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They had already booked a non-refundable flight, so they decided to come visit us anyway. They told us a week after the fire, and a month later they arrived. Usually, my in-laws take over our spare bedroom, but after losing our house and initially staying with friends, we had only managed to find a one-bedroom duplex to rent near downtown Santa Rosa. We put them up at the local Hyatt, which was conveniently located, a brisk walk or short drive from our rental. 

Our side of the duplex shared a wall heater with the apartment next door. Or better, their unit was in the same spot as ours, and no wall separated them, just a shaft. Many nights, we could hear the couple’s son making hooting noises like an owl while the TV was playing some sitcom or late-night show. He hooted for hours at a time. 

The old house next door stood on a lot ravaged by weeds. We had a view of the overgrown, messy front yard from our living–room and bedroom windows. It would have been hard for anyone to reach the front door without first cutting a path through bushes and weeds that had turned into bushes. The backyard had become largely invisible. Whatever it might have held, plants had swallowed whole. The house and yard would have had an off kilter, picturesque charm if not for the windows. Aluminum foil covered every single one of them from the inside, every single one. At first, I had believed the home to be abandoned, but then I noticed that the mail person was still filling the mailbox with junk. A neighbor told me that someone was still living inside. But who? And how? The neighbor didn’t know.  

Everything we owned had burned in the wildfire — Shirin’s paintings, my books. For many years my wife had worked as a project manager in the car industry but had finally returned to her first love. Our garage had been her studio, and she wasn’t able to work in the apartment. All my syllabi and course readers had burned, because I hadn’t stored them in the cloud. Some I found in old email attachments. Many nights I sat in front of this new computer looking for shiny morsels of the files on from the old one. This new machine made me self-conscious; it wanted my attention. I couldn’t think into it. 

Ask my father-in-law about his life, and he’ll tell you he likes dogs. The truth is he doesn’t. He never allowed his own dogs inside the house, and he didn’t take care of any of them. The first one the family kept on the balcony, as though in an outdoor cage. Farid is disgusted by the hair of our dogs that inevitably makes it to the soles of his socked feet, but he never thinks of packing house shoes. After we picked them up at the hotel and drove to our apartment for dinner, you could see his hesitation at the door. He’s never worn shoes inside the house, but the moment Vanya and Hikari came to greet the visitors, the temptation to not slip off his sneakers tucked at his face. He didn’t reach out to pet the dogs, and, stiffened when Vanya sniffed his pant legs for in search of some history. 

Farid is eighty-five, Judy seventy-seven. He retired thirty years ago, and she hasn’t worked in twenty. Shirin worries she might not have much more time with her parents, and she makes an efforttries to fly to Phoenix at least twice a year and stay for a week. Before this visit, she said, “I want more stories. Stories about Dad’s life in Iran before he came to the States.”  Farid got a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Arizona and married Judy, who was a history major. “I want more stories about their life together in Iran, and what it was like to leave the country again just before the revolution. I want to know what it was like to apply for jobs at American universities while the hostage crisis unfolded. Dad has never shared much of his life.” 

Farid won’t buy a smartphone; he won’t use computers. He can’t use the entertainment console in his new car. He critiques Shirin’s paintings by size and subject matter. He’s never understood what I am doing for a living, even though he worked in academia just like me. He’s never even tried to read a single line of what I’ve written. And Farid isn’t much of a talker. The whole family, —  Farid, Judy, Shirin, and her brother Bijan — , only talks about very safe things. Action movies they watched, food they ate, cars they owned. The room gets very quiet when feelings are mentioned, the room gets very quiet. If you press too hard, Farid will explode, and that is usually the end of the evening. Everyone scatters, and he’ll mutter to himself before going to bed. Judy will touch certain subjects Farid shies away from, but she won’t go into details. 

Before her parents arrived in Santa Rosa, Shirin had made a list of things she wanted to ask about; , but over the course of that first dinner in our small kitchen, the conversation veered from the fire, which started out as a safe subject, to Shirin’s loss of her paintings, and then to her senior year in high school and Farid’s refusal to let her apply to New York art schools. “I would have loved to go, and I still don’t understand why you didn’t let me apply,” she said. “You said you didn’t know the schools, and that I shouldn’t live in a big city. You wouldn’t budge.” 

He stared at her. Farid’s hearing is bad and has been for some time. It’s impossible for him to follow a conversation in its entirety. Only Judy’s voice breaks through to him, but even that isn’t a safe bet anymore. “You didn’t apply?” he asked, and it became clear that he hadn’t heard the question.what was said. 

Shirin repeated what she’d said herself, and Farid’s face turned from blank to something that made me afraid. It was a subtle shift, a slight hardening. “I don’t remember that.”  

“I think I could have had a much better start if you had supported me. But you only let me apply to state schools. You didn’t even try to find out about the schools I wanted to attend.” 

“A young woman cannot live in the city by herself. I would do everything the same all over again,” he said with a grand gesture of his arm that indicated that he wouldn’t talk about this subject anymore. He was finished; , it was done. 

It had only been an hour or two since her parents arrived, and everyone was very quiet. “The meatballs are very good,” her dad said in my direction, because I had done the cooking. “You’re a good cook, just like me. You need to give me the recipe.” 

I explained that the meatballs were from Costco. Everything we bought after the fire was from Costco. The few pieces of furniture, the mattress, our clothes, the spaghetti, the sauce, even the salad. Judging from his face, he hadn’t heard me. I said it again, much louder. He shook his head in his quick, this-is-my-final-answer way, which maybe meant, No big deal; or, What a fraud; or, That’s probably why I liked them so much. Maybe he wanted his compliment back. 

There’s a halting quality to the way he talks, as though he’s shopping in a supermarket he’s never set foot in before. He knows all the items, but they are in different places, and it takes him some time to find what he needs. I’ve never known him to speak any differently, but the pauses between sentence fragments have become longer. That night, whenever he couldn’t find whatever words he was looking for, he froze, his eyes bulging a bit. That was new. 

When he talks to his cousins on the phone, he becomes an entirely different man. His face is all smiles, his speech is fast and theatrical; he’s putting on a show. In Farsi, he’s gregarious. I’ve seen him with his sisters in Los Angeles, talking rapid fire, dancing after dinner to old records. With his Iranian family, he’s Farid, the prodigal son, the only son. “Family is the most important thing in life,” he’s said on more than one occasion, but the last few years he’s stopped talking to three of his four sisters. Arguments over property back in Iran, over custody of their mother, over the funeral of their mother just last January. 

Shirin has a cousin with whom she shares a birthday:, a woman we once roomed with in LA for an extended summer. They were close, as close as cousins who grew up on opposite sides of the continent can be. But she hasn’t talked to her in two years, because her cousin’s mom, Farid’s oldest sister, wrote Shirin a long letter insulting Judy and Judy’s side of the family . Tto get back at her brother. The siblings’ fight also poisoned the cousins’ relationship.  

“You don’t have a television?” Farid asked after dinner, while Shirin and Judy were sipping a last glass of wine. At home, he watches an action movie every night. The quality doesn’t matter, but it needs to be fast and loud. 

“No,” I said. “We haven’t bought one yet.” 

“I’m tired,” he said and got up. Judy stood up as well, even though she hadn’t finished her wine, and even though she had just started to ask Shirin about renting a studio space. Before he got into the backseat of our car, Farid took a look at the house next door, the aluminum inside the windows reflecting the streetlights. He said, “Is there also a nicer area in this city?” 

A short time later we said goodnight in front of the Hyatt. Back in the car, Shirin just looked straight ahead and , refused to say anything. We took the dogs for a short walk, and her answers to my banal attempts at conversation were answered with just a word or two. 

 

I broke off contact with my own parents some ten years ago, a fact Shirin has never been quite able to swallow. I come from a long line of family feuds. My mother hasn’t spoken to her sister in forty years, and my grandmother didn’t speak to her sister for the last twenty years of her life.  

When Shirin and I met, we were both in relationships with other people. Six weeks after meeting me, she told her parents that she would get married, but not to her boyfriend of four years. They never blinked and started to plan the wedding right away. I was grateful. , I appreciated the healthy blandness of family relations. Farid was still on good terms with his LA sisters, and , everyone seemed to get along well enough. Judy’s mom in Wisconsin quickly became my favorite relative. We had visited them all, and they had welcomed me into the family.  

Shirin suspects me of hating all parents, all family, but that’s not true. I distrust most families, but not having parents that I can accept and embrace as parents, is a forever wound. When I see adult children of my colleagues enjoy their visits home for a weekend or during the summer, my throat swells shut. Of course, time has made it easier to cope. Yet I cope better with not having parents I can call parents mostly because I don’t make friends with people who have kids. 

Am I taking satisfaction in the recent fights within Farid’s family, or in his inability to listen to what his daughter is saying? No, but I do feel less crazy — , a word my mother used in one of her strange letters to me, which on the surface are an attempts at starting a conversation, but are really only her wanting to lash out at me. Whenever I tried to explain how destructive my family was, Shirin would give me this look that said, I still love you, but I think you might be fucked up. Crazy.  

But something else was bothering me, something that was harder to put into words because I didn’t want Shirin to know, at least not yet. Watching Farid made me afraid. Watching him, I wondered if I was looking at my own future. I’m an immigrant, just like him. I’m eight years older than Shirin as , he is eight years older than Judy. My hearing is nearly as bad as his. I’ve been wearing hearing aids to be able to continue teaching. After almost thirty years in the States and not speaking my native tongue except for two or three visits to my home country, I wake up in the mornings with songs from my childhood in my head. I still remember the lyrics. Sometimes, at odd moments in the classroom or in a committee meeting, I forget the English term and only my old language makes itself available. These are brief moments, for sure, but they occur more often now. I’m nearly sixty — what will I sound like at eighty-five? 

Farid hadn’t planned on spending the rest of his life in America; I, on the other hand, never wanted to go back. He embraced the culture of the United States, but never entirely the language. I make my money talking about American literature. But still, people will never let you forget that you weren’t born here. They’ll ask about the accent, about how you like it here — as though you’re some tourist — and eighteen-year-old freshmen will feel more American than you, even though you’ve been living in this country since before their parents even met. My entire past, what I had saved from it, just burned, and this makes me feel lonely. Thirty years of my past I won’t be able to document or explain ever again. 

 

After the walk, Shirin smoked weed out on the stoop, and I had another cocktail. Our oldest dog Amir had died earlier in the year. In his last weeks, both Shirin and I had acquired a license to buy medical marihjuana; we wanted to buy CBD oil to make him comfortable. “Making him comfortable” became our way of speaking about his death. Shirin had smoked weed in college but stopped when we moved from Massachusetts to the Midwest. I’m still not sure why. Her roommate in Amherst had provided her with pot, and in Michigan she didn’t know anyone who smoked, but that can’t be the whole story. In any case, she didn’t start smoking again until after our move to California and after Amir had died. I joined her occasionally, but after our house burned down, I couldn’t handle putting a glowing stick in my mouth anymore. Edibles made me trip so hard, I grew afraid. In the end, I stuck to alcohol. 

Shirin and her brother both smoke to feel something other than dread and anger. With pot, they appear like average, somewhat talkative people. In order to feel themselves and feel themselves to be free of their everyday worries, they smoke as soon as they get home. It helps them navigate family life, their own expectations, the demands of their spouses, their spouses’ demands to open up. Weed is feeling, or it’s the wall behind which feelings feel safe. They never smoke in front of their parents. 

There’s a story Shirin has told me about herself. When she was seven years old and in second grade, she started to believe that she could eat with her ears. At dinner, she stuffed peas and mashed potatoes and pieces of chicken into her ears, and when her parents told her to stop, she snuck granola and old bread into her room and continued. Four times hHer ears had to be pumped four times. Only in fourth grade did she stop pouring chocolate milk down her ear canals. 

The story doesn’t explain a thing, but I thought of it while I watched her smoke, my own brain losing track of the fire, my in-laws visit, Shirin’s quietude. I loved her intensely; I didn’t know who she might be though, my wife of twenty years. 

 

* 

 

In the morning, we tried a fresh start. Together with Farid and Judy, we had breakfast at our favorite diner. Farid is worried about his cholesterol, and when the toast arrived, and he had forgotten to order it dry, he took his napkin and wiped off the bread. Then he took Judy’s napkin and wiped some more. “Look at all the potatoes they gave me.” He pointed with his knife. “So many potatoes.” 

Shirin asked if they bought an electric car. “No,” he shook his head. “First, most of our electricity comes from coal-powered plants. And the minerals they use in the batteries — they are mined in poor countries. They want to suck them off the ocean floor now. Second, the Germans used batteries in their submarines. In WWII.” He pauses. “No, maybe WWI. The submarines were very small;, there was only space for one man, and they reached the American coast. They had battery packs all over the submarines.” 

Around noon we visited our neighborhood. FEMA had been cleaning up the lots for the past three weeks, and where our house had once stood, there was only dark soil. The debris was gone, the foundation was gone, any signs of the violence with which the fire had consumed our neighborhood were gone. We had only lived in that house for two years, and my in-laws had never seen it, never  nor slept in it. They couldn’t see the apple tree, our neighbor’s weeping willow, the rose bushes or the Calla lilies. I still saw them all, but for my in-laws, this lot was just like all the other ones around it. Empty. Even so, it was an impressive sight, to stand in an urban neighborhood and not see any houses. It wasn’t the same feeling you get when visiting a new development before work on the houses has started. This was different. Charred trees still remained on some properties, and the streets and sidewalks were visibly old. The edges of the neighborhood now appeared jagged; just down the road, one side of an otherwise intact house had been scorched. And even after six weeks, the smell from the ashes still stung our noses. 

Shirin’s parents had wanted to see the lot, but now that they were there, it was less impressive than what they had imagined. They didn’t want to take a walk around the neighborhood;, they stood near where our driveway had been and just looked at the emptiness before seeking shelter in the car. 

Afterwards, Farid and Judy suggested buying us something, but Shirin and I kept drawing blanks. Friends had given us cookware, silverware, plates, and bowls. The apartment was small, and we didn’t want any furniture beyond what we had already bought. We had new computers, new dog beds, new toiletries, new clothes. But Farid and Judy insisted, and in the end, we drove to Costco and settled on a crock pot. They seemed very happy with the purchase, and we unpacked it in the kitchen of our apartment and stored it on the top shelf of a cabinet Shirin couldn’t reach. Then we ordered pizza, and while we were waiting for the delivery, Farid found and opened Shirin’s small box of edibles and pre-rolls. “You smoke?” he asked me. I had poured two glasses of whiskey and handed him one. 

“Shirin does.” 

“Is that right?” He took a sip of whiskey, grinned, picked up a pre-roll and sniffed. “Do you get high?” He turned toward his daughter, laughing at his own, drawn-out words. But you could also see that he was intrigued. “Last year, one of my cousins’ kids got married. We went down to Tucson for it. After the first dance, my cousin pulls me away and we leave the ballroom and stand on the terrace. No one’s outside, it’s too hot, but he lights up.” He paused a moment, a sly grin spreading. “So I took a few drags, but I didn’t feel anything.” 

“You didn’t inhale,” Shirin said. “Or the weed was bad.” 

“No-o,” Farid protested. “My cousin has good weed. He smokes every day. But it doesn’t have any effect on me.” He seemed satisfied by the lack of a more interesting experience. He had withstood it. 

The doorbell rang, and I went and paid the driver. Instead of eating in the kitchen, we carried plates and napkins into the living-room, which also doubled as our office. We had crammed two desks in there, plus a futon and a small coffee table. Judy and Shirin sat on the futon, while Farid and I took a desk chair each. Vanya came and stared longingly at everyone’s plate, and Farid taunted him, leaning toward the dog and eating the slice as though filming a commercial, saying, “Hmmm, it’s very good, so delicious.”  

Shirin asked Judy about the countries they crossed in the early 1970s, on their way from Bremerhaven, Germany to Ahwaz, Iran. 

“Oh, so many,” Judy said between bites.  

“What is that?” Farid asked.  

“She asked what countries we drove through on our way to Iran, after visiting Mom in Iowa.” She turned to Shirin. “You were so small.” 

“Huh,” Farid said. “I still can’t believe we did that.” 

“What do you mean? What part of it?” Shirin asked. 

“We got off the plane, and your mom stayed in the hotel, and I took a cab to the docks. I’d never been to Germany before, didn’t know the port at all and didn’t speak the language, but I found the right place, and got the car. It was brand-new, a Mustang II, six cylinders. Such craftsmanship.” 

“Where did you stay?”  

He shrugs, and Shirin turns again to Judy. “I don’t remember,” her mom said. “But there wasn’t much space in the car, and we squeezed you in the back, among the bags, so you wouldn’t be jostled too much.” 

“Do you remember any meals? Where did you eat?” 

Farid didn’t seem to have heard the question, and Shirin repeated it. 

“My ears. I should have them looked at.” He grinned. “I haven’t been to the doctor in ten years. Only to the dentist. It’s so expensive. I’ve spent twenty thousand dollars on my teeth in the last ten, fifteen years.” 

I removed my right hearing aid and showed it to him. “The old ones burned,” I said very loudly. 

“You’re wearing these?” Farid asked. He seemed interested, and I explained how I had gotten them, that you only needed a visit with an audiologist. I tried to make it sound as accessible and harmless as I could, and the truth is, it’s an easy process. What I didn’t say was that the hearing tests are humiliating to me, that they stress me and make me sweat. I’m supposed to hear and distinguish sounds and words and I can’t. While I’m in the soundproof booth, I sweat as though I were running at a fast clip on a hot day. I don’t like to admit to weakness and needing help. Still, I’m more scared of losing the world I am inhabiting than of being humiliated in front of an audiologist. Losing my hearing feels like an all too obvious reminder of my mortality, but the technology is improving rapidly. I remember my grandmother sitting lost and suffering from depression in my parents’ living room, her hearing aids emitting shrill noises when she turned them up high.  

I suggested I clean one of them and let him try, but suddenly his interest had evaporated. He handed back the tiny device and said, “I don’t need them.” 

Shirin asked, “Dad, when did you know it was time to leave Iran?” 

But her father was still in thought. Or he hadn’t heard the question. Shirin repeated herself. “Oh,” he said. “We came back and didn’t have jobs. We had to move in with Judy’s mom.” 

“I found work first,” Judy said. “As a librarian. But in the winter the car died every other day. A Chevy Vega, I remember that. In orange;, two doors. It was such a good-looking car.” 

Farid waved dismissively. “It was a ’75 model, but boy, it had rust all over. A cousin of your mom sold it to us.” 

“Did you consider staying in Iran?” 

His face remained blank, then he picked up his empty plate and carried it into the kitchen. When he returned, he opened Shirin’s box of pre-rolls again. He inspected the fine print on the plastic tubes, asked about the dosage. 

“We can try one,” she offered. 

“If you have time,” he said. “I don’t want to impose.” 

“Dad, of course I have time.” 

“Okay.” He agreed with a short nod, as though he hadn’t suggested it. 

While I cleaned up the living-room, Farid and Shirin went out the back door, to where the garage was located. The landlord stored garden tools and junk inside;, it was unusable, but the back stoop was relatively private even during the day. From the window above the sink, I watched Farid take the blunt from his daughter. He coughed violently after the first hit, but then continued to inhale, four or five times in rapid succession. 

After they came back inside, Farid poured himself a glass of water. It was four in the afternoon, and the sun outside was pushing clouds around without getting rid of them. Patches of clear sky appeared and disappeared again. “I didn’t know Shirin smoked.” Farid was still wearing his jacket. “I haven’t taken a nap yet.” He sat down on the futon in the living-room. “I think I feel something.” He turned to me and said, “In Munich, at the airport, I had an amazing sandwich.” 

Shirin asked, “What made it so great? What was on it?” 

“Lunch meat.” 

“What kind?” 

“Turkey.” He closed his eyes and paused for a second. “I’ll never forget that.” 

He sat next to me on the way to the hotel. “The sky is so white and blue.” He leaned forward, peered through the windshield at the sky above. He laughed, mesmerized by the colors. I’d never seen Farid drunk or stoned, but this time I had to help him get out of the car and to his hotel room. I guided him through the lobby, Judy leading the way toward the right hallway. Farid wanted to stop at the hotel bar to get some water from the dispenser, the one with lemon and cucumber slices, but Judy convinced him that they had water in their room. Luckily, they were staying on the first floor, and it wasn’t far. I had to steady my father-in-law, wait for him catch his breath, then take off his jacket once he had sunk onto the bed. For the first time I felt useful to him. Not like an accessory he doesn’t know and care about, but like a benign stranger lending him a hand. It was a pleasant feeling. “Oh boy,” he sighed. “I should have eaten more pizza. I didn’t eat enough pizza. The drink and then the weed.” He shook his head and sank back against the pillows.  

That evening, we didn’t meet up with my in-laws again. Judy called to say that they were staying in. Shirin and I took the dogs on a walk through a nearly deserted downtown, and then sat out front, me holding a cocktail, she a blunt. We laughed quietly at how happy Farid had seemed, at how he had lost control for once.  

We didn’t know it at the time, but inside the house next door, behind the windows covered in aluminum, the man who had once lived there together with his wife and two children, was building a guillotine for himself. Instead of a blade, he was using a giant screwdriver. He rigged the apparatus so that he would be able to use it without help. Nobody had seen him in a year and a half, but once he had been a well-liked neighbor. People had liked the family. He had been a good father, a good and helpful neighbor, people remembered. They couldn’t say what had happened.