ROYA SHAMS

TEHRAN, AUGUST 1987

That first kiss between Leila and me was a strange and foreign word, one someone might clumsily translate as “sky” but that actually meant something closer to “heaven.”

Ali and Gilgamesh called the house the next night from the campsite pay phone. They were silly, drunkenly checking in on their wives. They must have imagined us bored out of our minds. Ali shouted, laughing:

“Gilgi nearly shot off his foot this morning!”

“Don’t believe him, he’s lying!” shouted Gilgamesh. “Full of shit! He’s a cow! Chert-o-pert!”

While I held the phone, quietly telling Ali to be careful, that it was no time to get caught drinking, I watched Leila look through Ali’s old rock records. They were contraband I could never bring myself to let him throw away. Leila made little faces at certain records, smiling at Aretha Franklin, laughing at the Monkees. Gilgamesh asked to talk to Leila and she accepted the phone from me, tucking it between her shoulder and ear and rolling her eyes. As she listened to her husband, she surreptitiously held up the pointer finger of one hand and used the other to make a fist around it, then pantomimed snapping the finger off. She smiled knowingly at me, though I didn’t recognize the gesture.

When Leila hung up the phone, her eyes flashed with trouble. Or maybe more like inspiration, or purpose. She knelt back down to the records and put one on our turntable, a little puke-green plastic RCA player left over from my teens, speakers popping as she moved the needle around the vinyl looking for a specific track. As the first notes began to play, she stood up and held out her hand.

That’s when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details drip and pool. Minor chords on a twelve-string guitar twinging out of the little speakers. Leila, a full head taller than me, pulling me in close to dance. Her smell of sweat and jasmine-cedar. Mick Jagger’s voice, “I want you back, again. I want you back, again.” The dry copper taste of my tongue.

“I wish it wasn’t so hard to be good,” I whispered, surprising myself, not even sure Leila could hear me. “I’m trying. I really am. I’m just exhausted.”

“I know,” she said. “I can see it, azizam. I know.”

She squeezed me tighter, rocking from foot to foot to the music. The sad song turned jaunty, though the lyrics didn’t. Jagger pleaded, “Tell me you’re coming back to me, you gotta tell me you’re coming back to me.” How it felt like the perfect song then, even though we were together, the bud of us just starting to open. Something in the song’s plaintive yearning, that’s what it was, bone-deep yearning. We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.

Then the song was over and Leila bent back over to the record player and started it again, staying crouched down there as the song began, staying down there and then kissing my ankles through the guitar, my shins, my ankles again as Keith Richards howled and whooped his harmonies, and then the song was over again and she started it again, put the needle into the groove of the vinyl, kissing my knees, my hands, my wrists, and as the song faded out a third time Leila didn’t start it back over again, she let it finish and turn into silence. It was silence louder than the music had been, silence made big by the loudness preceding it—the silence after a scream, the silence after a gunshot. And then? And then we were touching everywhere. Then there was no separation between us, Leila and me, between our bodies. No separation anymore: not music or country or clothes. Not fear. Not even history.