ALI SHAMS AND RUMI

Two figures. One tall, gaunt, solemn, dressed in farm coveralls and high boots, Cyrus recognized immediately as his father. It was rare for Ali to appear in Cyrus’s dreams, almost as if out of respect for the rest he’d finally found after a relentless life—wartime service (Ali had a desk job managing supply-line logistics, which, though comparatively safe, was still surprisingly high-stakes and left him with no small amount of survivor’s guilt), a wife’s sudden and meaningless death, immigration to a hostile nation, nearly two decades of six-days-a-week manual labor. Ali had earned the right to rest, even in Cyrus’s dreams.

Still, it made Cyrus glad to see him outside on the steps of what looked to be a small music venue, smoking a cigarette. Like pretty much everyone else he knew, Ali had smoked heavily in Tehran, but as a cost-saving measure he’d quit on arriving in America. It was one of those billion little sacrifices a parent makes that a child never considers. The kind, Ali thought, only the worst, most loathsome parents ever mentioned. On the steps though, Ali seemed at such ease with the cigarette, so natural. It was like his hand had regained a digit.

Next to Cyrus’s father was a gorgeous man in orange and purple silk robes taking a deep drag of a blunt. The man had high, supermodel cheekbones and a long black beard the color of deep night with little braids woven into it, a few decorated with tiny shells and beads. On the step to his side was a red plastic cup filled with dark wine.

“You’re Ali Shams!” the beautiful man said, exhaling a thick swirl of smoke. “Wow wow wow, I’ve been dying to meet you!”

Ali, sitting next to him on the steps of the venue, smiled unevenly. From the club behind them loud bass and drums throbbed from a hardcore show. Young people with geometric tattoos and tight black clothes milled about, walking to and from their cars.

“I am, yes,” said Ali. “And you’re really you?”

The second man laughed, taking a sip from his Solo cup.

“Haha, Ali Shams, I am. My name is Jalal al-Din Muḥammad. You might know me as—”

“Mevlana. Rumi. Wow. My son Cyrus wants to be a poet. Koroosh. He loves you. He would love to meet you,” Ali said, then paused. “Do you know about Cyrus?”

Rumi smiled.

“Of course! How do you think I got here?”

“Ahhh,” said Ali. “I’m still figuring out how all this works.”

“It took me a bit too.”

From inside the club a singer screamed “crowquill,” screamed “threnody.” As smoke lifted from Ali’s cigarette and Rumi’s blunt, it appeared to reveal more stars in the night, like the smoke was clarifying the air instead of fogging it. It was bringing the stars closer. At such near distance, they almost looked edible.

“Shit, where are my manners—you want some of this?” Rumi asked Ali, holding the blunt out toward him. It smelled like fresh bread, like noon barbari. Ali shook his head and Rumi shrugged, taking another long drag.

“Yeah, it took me a while to get the hang of things here.” When he said “here,” Rumi pointed not to the parking lot or the sky around them, but to his own head. “What I’ve noticed,” he continued, “is that here, it’s the little details that matter the most. In life we were yoked to all these big details—bodies and tribes, who is family, who is enemy, where and what to eat. All that shit drowned out the subtler shades of experience. Here, it’s about this Swisher, this cheap wine, this crystal.” When he said “crystal” he reached absentmindedly toward the sky and plucked a small star, which burned heatlessly—like a firefly—in his palm.

“I think I’m starting to understand that,” said Ali. He reached up to pluck his own star, but when he opened his palm it wasn’t a glowing firefly star but a tiny chicken egg. Rumi laughed. From inside the venue the crowd was chanting “O time! Thyyy pyr-a-mids!” over and over and over.

“Should we go inside?” asked Ali, tugging at the edges of his farm boots.

“I think we’ve got a bit more time,” answered Rumi. “And I wanna finish this,” he said, pulling from his blunt, which seemed to be getting even longer as he smoked it. Ali frowned. He didn’t like people smoking marijuana, but he figured if anyone could, it was Rumi.

“Tell me something real about yourself,” Rumi said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t want whatever bullshit tactical non-secret secret that passed for intimacy down there. I want you to tell me something real.”

“I don’t even know you,” Ali said.

“That’s not true,” Rumi said, placing a hand on Ali’s back, glowing a little. Ali dragged from his own cigarette.

After a long pause he said, “I think my wife was cheating on me before she died.”

“Whoa. No shit?” said Rumi.

“Hm?” asked Ali.

“It means like, ‘for real’? You really think that? Why?”

“Ah, I don’t know. Little things. She never looked at me like she desired me as a man. I don’t think she ever really wanted me that way. From when we very first met. I think she always looked at me different, like the way you’d look at a baby bird you found and tried to nurse back to health. Some combination of affection and pity. The pity, though. That was such a big part of it.”

“Yeesh. I’m sorry, man. But that doesn’t mean she was cheating on you?”

“Yeah. When Roya was pregnant with Cyrus she got weird, especially toward the end. Maybe somehow she sensed what was going to happen. Something in her knew about the plane, about the end coming. That’s what I thought for a long time. But more than once in those last months I heard her on the phone, and she’d go silent when she realized I was near. Sometimes she’d hang up mid-sentence. After Cyrus was born she seemed so happy, but not necessarily around Cyrus. Happy like she’d freed herself of something. Or was about to? I don’t know. I was working a lot then, trying to save money…”

“Christ. I’m sorry, man.” Rumi looked down at his own shoes, and Ali used the nub of his cigarette to light another. “That’s super real.”

“I thought this all would be different,” Ali said, gesturing toward the parking lot. The full moon overhead was spinning in a slow clockwise circle. “Rivers of honey, eternal sunshine, all that.”

“Hah, yeah. That’s how they get you,” Rumi said. “That stuff is around. You can have it if you want. It’s fun for maybe three days. But honestly, it’s kind of played out. Have you ever tried eating more than like, two spoonfuls of honey?”

Ali laughed a strange creaking laugh, like a heavy door opening for the first time in years.

“It’s gross, man!” Rumi said, pulling from his blunt. “It’s super fucking gross. It makes you sick.”

The band inside was in a long instrumental riff now, orchestral almost. Amidst the heavy drums and bass was the sound of flutes, a harp, maybe even birdsong.

“That makes sense,” said Ali. “You’re still so beloved on earth anyway, it makes sense you’d want to stay near it. Cyrus told me once you were the best-selling poet in America. A dead Persian poet! I thought that was crazy.”

“Well, I don’t know how Persian the me they read in America really is.”

Ali nodded, though he had no idea what Rumi meant. He noticed suddenly that Rumi’s arms were covered with colorful tattoos depicting negargari, little illuminated Byzantine miniatures, and the figures, some on horseback, some firing bows, were moving all around, playing out their little lives across Rumi’s skin. Ali hated tattoos, thought they were the stamp of low people, but as with the marijuana, for some reason it didn’t offend him so much on Rumi. The poet’s robes were flowing now too, fluorescent rivers of deep oranges, yellow-blues emptying into each other. Behind the two men, a twenty-something in a tight T-shirt that said JANE DOE came out of the club doors.

“You ready?” she asked Rumi.

“Yup yup,” he said.

She nodded and went back inside.

“You’re going on?” asked Ali.

“Yeah, sounds like it’s about time.”

“How is Cyrus doing? With…” He paused. “With all the Orkideh stuff?”

Rumi tipped the last dregs of his Solo cup into his mouth, snubbed out the remainder of his blunt, which sparked out in tiny little strawberries. The venue behind the two men had grown silent, and the stars above them were glistening Technicolor: garnets and emeralds and sapphires, fat jewels set in the night’s crown.

“Man, it’s a trip, isn’t it? Hard not to think it was fated.”

“You don’t think he’ll do it, do you? You don’t think he’ll…” Ali paused. “Kill himself?”

“You know what I think?” asked Rumi. The bright colors from his robes were passing freely now from his arm tattoos through his beard and back into his robes. “I think Cyrus is going to be able to write a hell of a book. I really do. I hope I get to read it.” He paused. “Martyrs, man. We just can’t escape it, can we?”

Ali wanted to ask him what he meant by “we”—men? Persians? Something else? But Rumi had gotten up, was pulling him through the venue. It was pitch-black, and nearly silent save deep, undulating throbs coming from the house speakers as the two men worked through the crowd. As they got up to the stage, only barely visible through the legions of anonymous bodies, Rumi drew near Ali’s ear.

“Watch this,” he said. When he leapt up onto the stage the entire hall went silent—completely silent, even the throbs from the house speakers muted now.

Ali watched from just beneath the stage as Rumi smiled a great smile, a smile that seemed to start in his chest, eight hundred years of smile lines working their way across his entire person. The hall was somewhat illuminated now and Ali looked around to see hordes of hardcore kids, hundreds of them dressed in black, pierced, tattooed, all of them looking at the stage as the brilliant colors swirling around and through Rumi moved from his hair to his skin to his robes and back.

Onstage, Rumi began humming a tiny melody, no microphone, maybe just four distinct notes, but the sound repeated loudly and echoed throughout the hall, and the throngs of young people began swaying along to it, like skinny trees in a great wind.

A short man next to Ali, whom he recognized as his son’s friend Zee, put his arm around his shoulders and together they swayed as Rumi began to speak in a bottomless baritone:

“An atash-e sadeh ke to ra khord-o-bekest…”

Zee looked up at Ali and mindlessly, reflexively, Ali translated for him: “The simple fire that ate you…”

Rumi was repeating it, and as he did the audience began chanting in unison, “An atash-e sadeh ke to ra khord-o-bekest, an atash-e sadeh ke to ra khord-o-bekest.”

And then Zee and Ali were chanting it together too, arm in arm, louder and louder with everyone, and as they did Rumi’s head began to glow more and more until suddenly it was white hot, on fire, his whole head like the burning faces of the prophets in old paintings, just one great flame. The audience and Zee and Ali kept chanting as the ceiling of the venue peeled back like a tin of salty fish, and the smoke from the fire that had now consumed Rumi rose up into the night. All at once, ash coated every glowing gem in the sky.