The warm room has no other reason but yours. As the mass displacement grows, its answer turns inward, its cure simple. But grace may be harder to bear than its brutal opposite. For the warm room exists only by virtue of a single, chill twist. Touch the wooden cup left out for you, pick it up, and turn it over. Run your finger along its smooth length. Put your lips to its waiting lip, and empty it: your mouth will find nothing more solid than idea.
The shower does not wet you, nor do the towels dry. You can flip through the pages of these loving books, but you cannot hold them. The vibrant clothes slip onto your body, but they give no feel. It dawns on you only piecemeal where you are. How you have dropped down through your own, scribbled rabbit hole into this thought museum and now sit gaping at the shape of your evacuated life from the far side of the mental mirror.
Maybe you lost your given life, searching for this escape. Or maybe you did yourself in, bitter revenge on life for failing you. Or maybe the world would have cut you up anyway, and only luck led you to this emergency windbreak just before succumbing. Something in your refugee heart never felt at home anywhere, except in this room of maybes.
Down the hillside from this mountain cabin, grim realism rounds up its latest deportees. Global affairs pursue their footrace, for not everyone has been sentenced yet. You've made it to this sheltered Switzerland just before the police dogs close their jaws on your ankle. Or: you've fallen, out there in the dark, along the frozen border, and the last thought that crosses your expiring mind is this fire-lit chalet.
In the warm room, you are the goal of all these stocked provisions. All things await the theater of your needs, here freed at last to work its changes. In the warm room, you are the doer of all acts, the receiver of all action, the glow that lights these sanctuary walls, the warmth these eager trappings radiate, the fading coal, the lone heat source in a world gone zero and random.
31
"You need something?"
The Shiite Cronkite asks so gently, it's almost possible to imagine that today he means it. You can't catch his eye. But perhaps a blindfolded head swing in his direction can still haunt him with the parody of a human glance.
"Walter," you say. Slower now, with all the gravity of a dying animaclass="underline" "Walter. What's your real name?"
You hear him shrug. Currents of compressed air roll off his undulating shoulders and form in your ears, as clear as words. You put your hands out in front of you, on your wasting thighs, palms up.
"Tell me," you beg. "I know Ali's. Walter. Listen. I can't hurt you."
You hear him, this peasant driven off the desiccated land, here at the front only for that expedited ticket to heaven given to anyone who dies for the cause. You hear him put his head down. Astonishing. Impossible. Yet still, your attenuated ears hear it.
when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.
Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.
All through the summer, words come back to you. At meals, or during your half-hour sprints along your oval track, or in the middle of the morning bathroom ritual, now trimmed back to a frenzied seven minutes. Forgotten vocabulary, sometimes in your mother's voice, sometimes in the voice of those grandparents, fictional to you except for two short childhood trips Stateside when the Brits still pumped the oil and the Shah still issued the travel visas. Words return. The names of foods. The primary colors. The numbers from one to ten.
More than words: chunks of your mother's favorite stories, in translation. The one about the white-haired baby who grows up to be a mighty king. The one about a flock of birds who set out to find the fabulous Simurgh. They cross the seven valleys of Journey, Love, Knowing, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation, the thirty straggling survivors hanging on just long enough to discover, or rather to remember, that Simurgh means nothing more than "thirty birds."
Your cell is a nave. A ship, a dinghy adrift on the currents of wrecked empire. You lie back in the stern, shackled to your radiator, this room's rudder. Open seas leach you. You drift on the longest day of the year, bobbing near madness, the black overtaking you, infinite time, unfillable, longer even than those childhood nights when your own prison bedroom ran with a dread so palpable that sleep seemed certain death and death far better than this standing terror.
And then that frightened, fleshy face is there, next to yours, laughing in the dark.
What in all the world does a child have to be scared of? The old Persians, your people, called their walls daeza. Pairi meant anything that surrounds. See? Pairi daeza. You have a wall running all the way around you. That, my little Tai-Jan, is the source of Paradise.
perfects itself. You lie back against the wall, as far from the radiator as the links of chain allow. Bone-cold all winter, the machinery now comes alive, eager to add its joules to the summer inferno.
You close your eyes and will yourself into another climate. The volume materializes in your hands, the weight, the heft, the binding's resistance. You turn the treasure over and over, resolving the details down to the publisher's insignia on the spine. Through your eyelids, you inspect the cover illustration. Your read the blurbs on the back, the synopsis, the ISBN, all the precious trail marks you once squandered so profligately when they were yours to waste.
Each page of front matter passes one by one under your sentry fingers. Hours may dissolve, just playing with the stiffness of the paper, before you get to the actual first sentence. Lord Jim, the forty-four-point Garamond Bold announces to your hushed house of one. And again, in thirty-six-point type, on the next wondrously superfluous page. Or Great Expectations. Every menu name becomes a whole banquet where you might dine out eternally, for free.
You reach the opening sentence, the fresh start of all things possible. Modestly boundless, it enters bowing, halfway down that first right-hand page. You lie back against your paradise wall, your pillow. You make yourself a passive instrument, a seance medium for these voices from beyond the grave. Politics has taught you how to read, how to wait motionless, without hope. To wait for some spirit that is not yours to come fill you.
My name being Phillip. No: my father's name being Pirrip, I called myself Pip. Something about a graveyard, five little stones as visible as the door of your cell, the markers of brothers who gave up on making a living exceedingly early in this universal struggle. Every turn, every further constriction in the plot — yours or the author's — makes it easier to keep to the general contour. Where you cannot recall a scene, you invent one.
You recognize that underclass orphan making his way in an indifferent world. He was the first present you ever gave her. A fake heritage hardback edition that actually sold for $12.95 in the Cut-out Classics bin at both of the mall bookstore chains. Gave it to her for her birthday, half a year after you started going out. Back in that year when you were still trying to feed her all your favorites, to hand over to her all your secret treasures. Love me, love my childhood. Love my books. Maybe you meant an element of remedy in the gift. It had shocked you when she told you she'd never read it.