ORKIDEH
What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.
Many have done worse than me and been punished less. But most have done less and been punished more.
My name is Roya Shams. I died in a plane crash on July 23rd, 1988, when the USS Vincennes shot down my plane over the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Naval warship mistook my plane for a fighter jet and fired two RIM-66 Standard MR missiles at my plane. One of them hit the left wing, tore the plane apart. The plane and all of us on board were eviscerated almost immediately. Two hundred ninety of us, there, then not-there.
Except I’m still here. Wherever I go, there I am. Not there on the flight. The flight I was never on. Leila and I traded papers so she could escape Iran, escape Gilgamesh and his gray watery eyes. He’d found out about us. I was going to meet back up with her later, out of the country. In Dubai. Leila had my passport, I had hers. The passport photos were so high contrast, everyone basically looked the same, a wash of flash-white, two eyes and a mouth. Solemn black chador. Her precious face. It was a perfect plan.
Except Leila was plucked from living, like a tomato off a vine. There’s no meeting someone once they’ve been plucked from living. You just live with their absence, whispering “jaya shomah khallee” to a chair in which they might sit, a second unused pillow on the bed. Your place is empty. Except? Your place is empty.
Wherever I go, I carry the grace of having lived after I died. What did I do to deserve that? Nothing. That’s what makes it grace. It was my name on the flight log. My body that never washed up bloated on some poor fisherman’s beach. Grace to live at all—none of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.
But that’s a misunderstanding of grace, which doesn’t ask to be paid back. Even when you’ve been given the gift twice, emerged from your own death to run away from your husband. Leaving him to grieve you, to raise your child by himself.
I read an interview with a famous romance columnist where she said the question she gets asked most often was some version of: I love my partner but the relationship isn’t going anywhere and our lives are so intertwined at this point, I find myself fantasizing about him dying. It would solve everything without me having to become a villain. I could mourn him and then move on with my life. Is this normal? Am I a monster?
Grace: that I had enough money to get to Turkey. That I dressed in layers for cold. That long train ride alternating between crying so hard it was hard to tell if I was crying or laughing, and then feeling totally numb, a numb that terrified me with its stillness. Like a dead bird with all its guts scooped out.
Grace: that the man—the boy, really—at the border accepted my bribe, didn’t run Leila’s papers, which were all I had with me. Had he run them, whatever alert Gilgamesh put out on Leila would have been triggered. I would’ve been sent back to my life and punished. Or worse.
Grace: that the boy-man at the border accepted my bribe and was too young to demand more. That he didn’t know, or pretended not to anyway, that I would have done anything he asked. I’d pulled my blouse low to talk to him.
Grace: that he had eyes to see.
Grace: being able to use Leila’s passport in Ankara to buy a one-way plane ticket to New York City. Grace the ticket agent only glanced once at the photograph of dead Leila and thought she was me, also dead, though standing before him. Grace for the terrible quality of the photo. Grace that perhaps we all look the same.
God will never forgive me. Why should I?
Grace: to land in a city that is always on, lit up. To be able to wander twenty-two hours a day, learn the city, think, weep, watch, weep, wander, listen, wander, learn, listen, weep, wander, then pass out on a bench, on some grass, without being bothered.
Grace to own nothing worth stealing.
All around me, people had less. Men with plastic bags over bare feet mumbling gibberish to themselves under their breath, drinking from plastic bottles of clear liquor. Women hunched on stoops who could barely keep their eyes open to beg. I still had a good mind. I had words—enough to say “please” and “sorry” and “thank you”—all you need in any language, really, unless you’re a philosopher.
I stole a lot. Dressed as I was, I looked like a businesswoman. I tried to keep my clothes clean. Nice blouse, sharp pants. People didn’t watch me like they should have. I stole potato chips, water. I stole sleeping pills, socks. Pens, apples, maxi pads. In a bookshop I stole a Persian-English dictionary. In another, a Time magazine with a missile shooting off a warship. I had to look up the big white words: “Gulf Tragedy.” فاجعه. “Catastrophe.” Like a natural disaster. Not “massacre.” Not even “murder.” The imprecision of American justice was a given, even to Americans.
I read that dictionary as much as I could. I ate with it, slept on it, sometimes. It was soft enough, a paperback three inches thick. It was a place to put myself.
When I was outside the dictionary, I was hungry, desperately sad. Tired, afraid. I missed Leila. I missed her so frantically that saying “I missed her” isn’t enough. I could feel it in my body, the tips of my fingers and the soft skin of my ankles, in my eyelids. It all throbbed for her. I missed Cyrus too, but that was different. I missed Leila in my body. I missed Cyrus in time. I had all this time, wandering the city, no mouth to feed, no tiny body to rock to sleep. Too-open time made me think of Cyrus. I felt guilty for hardly thinking about Ali. So I wandered, I stole, and I studied the dictionary.
Grace, that dictionary. A place where every thing was attached to a meaning.
In America, that dictionary taught me all I needed. How to ask for a “bathroom,” how to read “uptown” on the subway signs. When I learned how to say “cigarette,” I walked around saying it to myself like a prayer, like an incantation. see-GARR-ett. It was my favorite word. If I walked up to someone and said it, one time in every five they’d hand me one. Language could make a meal like that.
But the dictionary didn’t prepare me for how much junk there was inside the language. How I could say “water”? or “Please, can you give me a glass of water?” and they’d be, for all intents and purposes, the same. Or just so subtly different that I could never hope to be able to learn the difference. Articles, formalities: ligature. Connective tissue filling the air. Filling time. It’s the difference between language and communication, yes. But then, communication was what I was after. I think it still is.
Even the letters themselves carry this junk. If I write “wri☨ing” or “wr↿t↿ng” any fluent English reader will still understand what I’ve written. I could even replace all my i’s with l’s, “wrltlng,” and it’s still basically legible. Clearly some of the compositional parts of the language itself are junk while others are essential. There is no dictionary to tell you which is which.
I read that our genetic code works this way, that most of the sequences are evolutionary fossils, replicated endlessly and meaninglessly, trillions of cells copying the same nothing for millennia.
If so much of my language is junk, both the language of my speech and the language of my body, it seems like a not insignificant portion of my living must be doomed to junk. There’s nothing in my life that isn’t bound to my language, or my DNA.
What comes the closest, I think, is sex. Not entirely without language of course, and certainly not without the body. But in terms of earnest, mellifluous human communication involving the least junk, sex reigns. It’s where the comprehension density is the greatest. A discerning lover can read an Odyssey in a gasp, a Shahnehmeh in a sigh.
I do not like to be penetrated. When I have been with men, I have had to explain this at great length. And then repeatedly defend the position against their “but what about’s” and “well you haven’t tried mine’s.” As if changing the label on a jar of poison would make it more appetizing.
Most of my female partners over my life have not needed to be told. More fluent, perhaps, at the semiotics of passion, though not all exchanges were passionate.
Leila was, though. Passionate. She discerned everything from a wince, a sigh. When Leila’s fingers first crept down and met an unconscious stiffening of my stomach, she read as robust an autobiography as I’ll ever write. And then she added her own movement, her own chapters to it. She changed the text of my living.
Others, of course, ignored these inferences when they perceived them, moving forward manfully. But these lovers didn’t lack the ability to perceive my desires. They lacked faith in my conviction. Quickly, though, they too would be convinced.
One of my first major installations, at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, was a piece called Comprehension Density. Two great slabs of copper, monolithic, each nearly four meters tall, facing each other. The copper was matte, but still reflected a bit of light from the bright of the room, some of that light bouncing back and forth between the slabs, like they were looking into mirrors of each other. But they weren’t mirrors of each other, one bent slightly into the other, slouching. They were all potential, great heavy wedges inside of which the soldier, the horse, the Venus, might be patiently waiting to be carved. And between the two monoliths, the little gap at their nearly squared bases, was a small television, a little box of a thing, with a streaming video of me reading the Shahnehmeh, in its entirety, fifty-six hours of video recorded in a single take. The video is pulled up to frame just my face—no need for everyone to see my water glass, my bathroom setup. I wore no makeup. My eyes were rheumy, the hard edges of my face contrasted usefully with the blunt copper monoliths. And as I read Ferdowsi’s text, I kept switching between English and Farsi, I’d switch back and forth and back and forth:
“Sohrab was astounded that the able warrior who had been fighting him was indeed a woman…”
Later,
بر ایرانیان زار و گریان شدم
ز ساسانیان نیز بریان شدم
دریغ این سر و تاج و این داد و تخت
دریغ این بزرگی و این فر و بخت
The glow from the television reflected between the slabs, multiplying itself, warping and diminishing itself in each repetition.
I’m proud of Comprehension Density. I think it holds up.
Of course, everything works this way in my head now, where I am. The when of now—dying my final, true death. It bungles everything. Time braids and frays.
My second year in America I had my first dream of Leila where she spoke to me in English. So many little dyings in this country, but that one was the most vicious.
In the dream, a man had cut down our fifty-year-old pistachio tree, Leila’s and my tree. In the dream, we had a pistachio tree. Fifty years old. That alone.
And so we were deciding what to do with this man, what his just punishment should be. I said something stupid about him owing us a year’s pistachio harvest, the cost of the tree. And then Leila said, in English:
“I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.”
She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.
I had started working in a dumpy Greek nostalgia diner that served watery coffee and played the same loop of Jerry Lewis and Bobby Darin songs over and over and over every day. There, I’d scrape fries congealed in ketchup off our red plastic serving trays, chop onions and tomatoes for hours. I’d suck hard knots of white bread while I chopped onions to keep the tears back. When it was slow, I’d draw. I’ve drawn my whole life—when I was in school, when I was bored, when I was nursing Cyrus—but at the diner, where everything was automatic, autonomic, where I was selling my body’s labor but not my mind’s, I found my sketches became so much more interesting, free. Unencumbered by higher brain, which clocked out when I clocked in, my whole person was functionally unconscious, bussing from table to table and then stealing away a minute or three drawing at my notepad in the dishroom.
I had a little apartment in the meatpacking district. Lower Manhattan then was full of burnt-out buildings, useless streets. Pork plants made everything smell like blood. Construction sites constantly whistled—a short one to announce a blast, a long one to say all clear. The mayor had closed down all the bathhouses (I didn’t know what these were until I lived by one), so there was all this empty space, restless energy. Prostitutes walked in pairs up and down Washington Street.
Really my apartment was just a mattress and a window, a toilet. But that was all I needed. I began papering its walls with my sketches. Water, rays of light breaking against water. Men, soldiers, bodies laid out like calligraphy. Lines and shapes fracturing, too vital to be contained within themselves.
I started using my diner money to buy oil paints, canvas, experimenting in my studio. Light washes of big colors, bold shapes. Then details. Playing with value, hue. Fat dark blues, arthritic grays.
It was a place to put myself. The less time I spent in my higher brain, in the abyss, the safer I was. In New York, my papers said my name was Leila. Everyone called me my dead love’s name. The love I had killed when I died. Except I was still here, living inside her name. I was here, Ali and Cyrus were there, and Leila? Leila was nowhere. Here, there, nowhere. When I painted, I could be nowhere too.
It happened like it does for anyone, fame. Bullshit luck disguised as a lifetime of hard work. But also vice versa. Years I spent chopping onions, buying paints. My apartment was so small I had to stack my canvases; in summer the paint from one sometimes stuck to the back of another. A few of those early canvases still have these paint spots on the back.
The handful of hours a week I wasn’t painting or working at the diner, I’d visit galleries. Obsessively. Always the little tiny ones in Chelsea, in the East Village. I wanted to see what everyone, absolutely everyone, was doing. Right then at that moment. Not the Met or the Frick. I knew well enough what the masters had made of things. I wanted to understand the visual vocabulary of the current moment, learn how to use all of it: textile art, neon sculpture, photography. Each felt like vital phrases within this new language that might allow me to communicate through—with?—the abyss. It was a way to stay on earth.
Over time some of the gallerists began recognizing me. Most were aloof, vaguely contemptuous at seeing me come in for the third time in a week, not buying anything. Others would be overly familiar, optimistically hoping I might be a casually wealthy connoisseur there to buy out the show’s centerpiece. I didn’t pay them much attention either way.
One Sunday I had just finished a breakfast shift at the diner. I smelled like hash brown grease and burnt onions, had a big pink blister on a knuckle from cleaning the grill. I walked straight from my shift to the art supply store to buy canvas and a quart of turpentine for my brushes. On my way home I passed the Linh Gallery in Chelsea, a small bright space for global contemporary painting. I’d met the gallerist a handful of times before. She was a puffy matriarch with short cropped black hair and a strangely geometric—nearly triangular—brown mole above her left eye. I stepped into her gallery on my way home. Featured was the work of a young Algerian painter, loose squares of color and texture inscribed within each other, with shadowy line drawings of people, animals, farm technology laid out around them.
After nodding in my direction as I walked past her, the gallerist noticed my bag from the art supply store.
“You are an artist!”
I was surprised to hear her. I looked around to see who she was speaking to, realized we were the only two people in the gallery.
“Ahh no, no. I work in a restaurant,” I said, pinching the collar of my work shirt as if to prove it was true.
The woman laughed.
“Every man who walks in here calls himself a painter, tells me about some Guernica he painted in high school art class. But you, with paint on your neck and a bottle of turpentine, say ‘I work in a restaurant.’ ”
Reflexively I felt for my neck, ran my fingers around it till I found a big scab of paint I’d missed under my jaw.
“I like to paint,” I stammered. “But I, I work in a diner.”
“I worked in a button factory for twenty years,” she said. “Not even making the buttons. Clearing the trash, cleaning the toilets of the people who made buttons. But even then I knew I was an artist, not a toilet cleaner.” She pulled a strand of hair behind her ear, set her jaw defiantly. “They were lousy buttons too! Warped in the heat, cracked in the cold.”
I laughed.
She came out from behind her desk and we talked that way for some time, her on the clock, me reeking of grease. She told me her name was Sang; “Linh” was for her last name. She told me about her escape to the United States after the America-Vietnam War. She worked in the button factory in the Bronx and raised a family there, three boys. Over time she put together her savings to open this little gallery for her own work. She told me about the vast public indifference to her paintings.
“I’m sure they were amazing,” I said. I meant it but it sounded idiotic coming out of my mouth, condescending and false.
“They were fine,” Sang said with the comport of someone not seeking compliment, someone who long ago moved on. “Nothing special. But I found what I was really, really good at was looking at other people’s work. Seeing what they couldn’t see in their own pieces. For better and worse.” As she spoke, she would squint her eyes, then relax them almost unconsciously. It looked like she was solving little mental math problems in her head while the rest of her face talked to you.
Sang said she began inviting other artists to feature work in her gallery. It turned out buyers were much more interested in their work than Sang’s own. Soon the rent became a little easier to secure each month, and then in time artists and their agents were fighting over her attention.
“Fucking creeps!” She laughed. “Like snakes in a chamomile field.”
I smiled, though the phrase made no sense to me. Sang would do that all the time, say these bizarre idioms that I couldn’t find in any book. “He’s wearing two hats!” she’d shout about some politician, or “he’s got stones for eyes” about an artist she didn’t like.
“Do you still paint?” I asked.
“This is my painting now,” she said, gesturing to the art on the walls, to the gallery as a whole. “All the art of the world, I mix it together, create new composition. You know curating is its own art, of course.”
I nodded, not really sure whether I believed it. For my part, I said little about myself. I had come to the U.S. from Iran after the revolution. I had no family here. I did not go to school for art, nor did I want to. I didn’t know this person or that person. I bought my supplies from the cheap chain store a few blocks away.
Sang said, “Okay, Miss Mysterious. Bring something in tomorrow then. One of your paintings.”
I was mystified. I’d never shown my work to anyone. Sometimes I’d make a little cartoon on a note to Leila, a little goose or a kite, or I’d doodle in the margins of something I was meant to be writing. But my painting, the painting that had become the bedrock upon which I’d built my new life, was mine alone. Other people never really entered the equation of my making. Why would you want to show your lifeboat to strangers? I mustered only “I…I work all day tomorrow.”
“Fine, Tuesday,” replied Sang, undeterred. “I will be here.”
“I actually work every day this week. I mean, all day. I don’t get off till late.”
Sang rolled her eyes.
“Bring it in when you can, then. I’m not going anywhere.”
She smiled when she said this, not warmly exactly but proudly, like she’d gotten me cornered. Two of her teeth had silver crowns that flashed when she smiled. I said, “You’re very kind. I’ll see what I can do,” and walked quickly toward the door.
“Wait!” Sang said. “You didn’t even tell me your name.”
I paused. I hadn’t been Roya in years. I’d been Leila. But even then, in that moment of dense unknowing and self-consciousness, even deep in the abyss as I was, I recognized my art could not be Leila’s, I could not put dead nowhere Leila’s name on something I made here with my own oniony blistered hands.
“Orkideh,” I said, surprising myself. It’s what Ali and I had called Cyrus when we thought he was going to be a girl, after the first ultrasound got it wrong. “It said you were going to be a girl,” Ali cooed down to Cyrus the day we brought him home, “but you were just a shy boy. Mashallah! Modest!”
Sang raised her eyebrows for a flash of a moment, then said, “I look forward to seeing your painting, Orkideh.”
I deliberated all week about what I should bring in. I didn’t have a cohesive subject. I didn’t even have a cohesive style. I knew I was a fraud, knew the gallerist would soon tell me as much.
Eventually what I picked was one of my newest pieces, something I’d been working on for weeks. Since then I’ve realized this was inevitable. Every time I finish something, still, I am certain it’s the best thing I’ve ever made, that everything else was the useful but disposable compost preparing my living for the masterpiece I’ve just wrought. Painting saved me, but I can’t say I loved painting. I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it. I resented work for this reason more than any other. The countless paintings that would never exist because I had to be working for money instead of painting. I resented my body for the same reasons, its ravenous gobbling up of time, its constant calibrations, needing to eat, shit, smoke.
The painting I brought to Sang was a fairly large one, four by six feet. A night scene, a battlefield. Boy soldiers with Byzantine features, mustached faces on pudgy child bodies, strewn across bloody soil like noodles. Armor, swords, guns. A great cloud of smoke, lots of deep grays on blacks, light blacks on darker blacks. Reds. And in the center of the piece, the field of boys, was a frightened child on horseback. He was holding a flashlight under his head. Naked, chubby baby thighs. And my brother’s face, Arash’s face. All under a great black cloak. Little child Arash pretending to be an angel in that cloak, in that war. Sweet Arash, who was then probably somewhere in Alborz nailing his windows shut, waving his military sword at ghosts.
I’ve told the rest of the “discovery” story elsewhere. The impossible luck of it all. Sang loved the painting and, after visiting my apartment and seeing the troves of work I had stacked, gave me my first solo show. A Times art critic who happened to miss her train was walking home one night and, on a lark, popped into the Linh Gallery to hobnob anonymously with us casuals. Except she too ended up falling for my work, writing a short but fawning article that mentioned the Arash piece, Dudusch, calling it “arresting” and “radically human.”
The show sold out. I quit the diner. Sang said she should have asked more for the pieces, but it wouldn’t have made a difference to me if they’d each sold for twenty times as much. I was officially working as an artist. Impossible. Sang rented me a tiny art studio, and I began getting my first invitations, commissions.
Yes, the sheer dumb luck, as many have said, as I’ve said myself. To get such a chance from a gallery, even a small one, is one in a million. To catch the attention of a Times critic as a nobody, with no connections, no experience. Impossible.
Except when Sang asked me to show her a painting, I had one. When she’d asked to see the paintings in my apartment, I had dozens. I’d worked my whole life to acquire the technical, the emotional skills to make those paintings. I’d chopped tomatoes and peeled half-eaten onion rings off plastic trays for thousands of hours. I’d painted in grief, weeping and painting, painting and weeping. There were probably weeks, whole months when I did not smile even once. I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbor’s farts. I spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints. I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son.
It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.
No museum wanted to touch death-Speak. Every curator thought it was fascinating, but every legal department said hell no. When we finally worked something out with the Brooklyn Museum I had to sign a giant binder’s worth of paperwork. My death would be in no way the museum’s fault. I had to sign a paper saying that if a patron accidentally got me sick, the museum would hold no liability. I had to sign a paper saying that if a patron got me sick on purpose, the museum would have no liability. I had to sign a DNR, then a DNR for my DNR. My oncologist had to estimate, to the day, when she expected me to die, then sign papers saying that if it happened before that day, the museum would not be responsible.
Finally, though, the lawyers were pacified and the gallery was set up. Big white walls, simple dim lighting. Little black chairs, a little black table. I had a small private room of my own in the back of the gallery space with a bed, a fridge, a bathroom. Mostly I didn’t use it if I didn’t have to. I wanted to be out in front with the people. All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster.