For as long as he could remember, Cyrus had thought it unimaginably strange, the body’s need to recharge nightly. The way sleep happened not as a fact like swallowing or using the bathroom, but as a faith. People pretended to be asleep, trusting eventually their pretending would morph into the real thing. It was a lie you practiced nightly—or, if not a lie, at least a performance. And while performance did not necessarily void sincerity, it certainly changed it. The speech you practiced in front of the mirror was always different than the one you ended up giving.
Nothing else worked this way, insisting upon pretending. You didn’t sit in front of a plate of rice, pantomiming swallowing in order to take the tiny grains into your stomach. Sleep alone demanded that embarrassing recital.
As if to incentivize the whole ordeal, the body offered you dreams. In exchange for a third of your living, you were offered sprawling feasts, exotic adventures, beautiful lovers, wings. Or at least the promise of them, made only slightly less intoxicating by the curious threat of nightmare. How sometimes, at random, your mind would decide to reduce you to a whimper, or a gasp, in the night.
These terms were non-negotiable, and if you didn’t agree you went mad, or you got sick, or you died. Cyrus had read about it over and over. After just twenty-four hours without sleep, you lost coordination and short-term memory. After forty-eight hours, your blood sugar spiraled, your heart began to beat irregularly.
It was hard for Cyrus not to see waking as the enemy. The way it corroded your power to exist—to live and think with acuity—until you finally submitted. Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote. What if everyone was more conscious of this? How would it charge, make more urgent, their living? “I have been poisoned, I have only sixteen hours until I succumb.”
Since Cyrus was very young, he’d been a terrible sleeper. As an infant, he slept so little his father, Ali, thought he might have a disability. Cyrus would stare out from his crib with sleepy, unmistakably angry old eyes, as if to ask, “Do I really have to do this?”
Ali would rock his son back and forth, rub finger circles in his scalp, sing to him, take him on late-night drives, but still Cyrus held on to his waking with desperate ferocity, a tiny horse trying to climb out of a muddy lake, only to sink further and further in. When his infant body could hold out no longer, Cyrus would finally fall asleep, and then always wearing a perplexed, annoyed look on his face that seemed to ask, “Who thought of this?”
Cyrus’s sleeping only got worse as he grew older. As a boy he began experiencing sleep terrors. Without warning or provocation he would rise in the night screaming, crying, sometimes battering himself violently. Cyrus’s sleep panics came to rule Ali, became the god to whom he prayed, pleaded, offered tribute.
Ali would go to his son during these fits, trying to shake him awake, but if Cyrus did wake it would be into a state of petrifying fright, with no sense of where he was or what had sparked his fear. His father would rock him and beg as he had begged countless times before, “Koroosh baba, please. Just sleep. Cyrus baba. Sleep.”
But Cyrus would keep screaming or crying or thrashing, sometimes for hours, before falling back into a tense rest, like a tongue in a mouth between bites.
Often Cyrus would wet himself and Ali would have to change his clothes and his sheets before returning to bed for a few hours. It would mean an extra trip to the laundromat, an extra load to wash and dry, an extra hour, an extra $2.50.
If Ali had ever spoken to anyone about this time, he would have said it felt like a profoundly unfair arrangement—the universe that took his wife from him should have at least given him an easy child. A fair-tempered good-sleeping child. It was injury to injury, Ali felt, a finger rooting around an open wound.
Ali’s wife, Roya, died just a few months after Cyrus was born. The circumstances were unspeakable. She had been flying to Dubai to spend a week with her brother Arash, who had been unwell since serving in the Iranian army against Iraq. Arash was visiting Dubai for a few months and Roya had impulsively decided to go join him, to shop, to eat, to rest. She’d been exhausted since the pregnancy and birth, distant from Ali and from her own son. This trip, Ali hoped, would help her reset, help to restore her warmth. It would be Roya’s first time ever on a plane, and her first time leaving Tehran since Cyrus’s birth. She was jittery with nerves. She had left the house wanting to look good, wearing her favorite outfit: a slim white trench coat and smart wool slacks, despite the July heat. She packed gifts for her brother, the new Black Cats tape and some Persian nougat candy.
Shortly after takeoff, Roya’s plane was destroyed by a U.S. Navy boat. Just shot out of the sky. Like a goose.
A U.S. Navy warship, the USS Vincennes, fired two surface-to-air missiles. One hit the plane and instantaneously turned it, and the 290 passengers on board, into dust. The reports really said that, Iran Air Flight 655 had been “turned into dust.” Maybe that was supposed to make the families feel better, it being so instantaneous. Made from dust, returned to dust. It was clean in a way, if you didn’t think about it too much.
There were sixty-six children killed on board Iran Air Flight 655. It would have been sixty-seven. But Roya had told Ali that their son was too young to fly, that she had earned a break from childcare after the long pregnancy. Otherwise. Otherwise.
Ali had been the one who wanted a child. His wife was less sure. Roya’s mother had been doting, endlessly affectionate. She’d design crafts and activities for her children. She’d cook three full meals a day plus snacks and cookies. She filled the house with books and art and music. She was the kind of natural, instinctive mother who made mothers around her feel inadequate.
Roya knew she would never be able to be the sort of mother her own mother had been, the kind who quivered with love like a wet branch. Even as an adult, Roya could hardly be bothered to feed or bathe herself.
Roya’s mother had spoiled her children the way grandparents spoiled their grandchildren. Roya thought she’d spoil a child the way rain spoiled a drive. Still, Ali insisted he’d do the lion’s share of the parenting.
“I am not a typical man,” he’d say. “The late nights, the diapers. Teeth coming in! Ridiculous little teeth!” He’d grab Roya’s hand when he said things like that. “I feel so excited about all of it.”
Roya would shake her head.
“That’s just because you don’t understand.”
Eventually, though, Roya assented. Cyrus was born March 13, 1988, a week before Nowruz, the Persian new year. All around Iran, people were imagining themselves moving through the future with slimmer bodies, better jobs. Families set out beautiful displays of sprouts, sumac, coins, garlic, and dried fruit to usher in the new year. Fat goldfish made lazy circles in little bowls.
The birth happened fast. Roya had been lying in her hospital bed. The nurses kept asking her if she was uncomfortable, if she was in pain, but she really wasn’t. Not comfortable, of course, but not in agony either. She thought maybe this was a bad sign. After a few hours, she started to feel more pressure and reached her hand down, only to feel the baby’s hair. She shouted for a nurse. Fifteen minutes later, her child was in the world. The birth wasn’t like she’d heard. Her doctor wasn’t even in the room when it happened.
The baby had come out without wailing or tears, and Roya didn’t cry either, just played with his tiny impossible digits. She thought he looked like a fruit. She joked they should name him “Bademjan,” the Persian word for eggplant.
“We can make eggplant stew. He will be best friends with a tomato.”
Ali stood at her side weeping enough for all three of them, saying “Alhamdulillah” over and over. He wasn’t particularly religious, but what else does one say when one’s son is born?
“He has eyes! Alhamdulillah. He has hair! Alhamdulillah.”
The baby had been so decorous, so solemn about the whole ordeal. He kept flashing his eyes around to study the new lights, the new faces.
“Alhamdulillah. Like a little king,” Ali said.
They named him Cyrus.
In the weeks following Roya’s death, Ali was left to do the lion’s share of the parenting, and the rest of it too. He wanted to get out of Tehran. He wanted to get away from Roya’s friends and family, who pestered him endlessly with unannounced visits and condolences and stews. He was sick of covered dishes from old women: ghormeh sabzi, chicken koobideh. He was sick of people’s pity.
He hated having to convince people he was both sufficiently immobilized by despair and also doing okay enough to take care of himself and his son. People would try to help him by cursing the United States and he hated that too. What did they know? The United States had shot his wife out of the sky, not theirs.
Ali had been the one to make the phone call to Roya’s brother Arash, who was waiting in his rented Dubai apartment for his sister to arrive. Arash wailed and howled—deep, bestial howls that even over the phone and across the room caused Cyrus to stir. Not crying but howling, as a wounded animal, crazed with rage and confusion, howls. Arash was already unwell since his service in the war, but Roya’s death tore into him like an arrow. For months, Arash did not speak, and then when he did he made little sense. Ali almost appreciated this in his brother-in-law. It was honest, at least. More honest than stock condolences, frozen chelo kabob left on his doorstep.
Ali’s anger—a moon. It grew so vast it scared him, so deep it felt like terror. On the news he saw the vice president of the United States say: “I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize for America kind of guy.”
That Ali’s family, his friends, could put words around their anger meant it was a different thing entirely from what he was feeling. Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.
Sometimes he wanted to get away from Cyrus. He’d sit in another room, smoking in the dark—he’d started smoking again—and when his son stirred Ali would wait as long as he could before sighing, going in to grudgingly care for him, to see dead Roya’s living brown eyes staring up at him from the crib. Ali stopped eating or answering the phone. His rage hardened into a plaque around his heart. He felt it, felt himself hardening too, and leaned in. He began buying jugs of homemade wine from a neighbor, applied for a visa. He studied himself in the mirror, thought his teeth looked sharper.
Ali fed Cyrus cold baby formula, resented the powder. He wanted to be able to make milk with his own body. Roya had bought several weeks’ worth before she left, but that had long since run out. It wasn’t fair, him having to buy this alien formula made of who knew what. It was probably the formula keeping Cyrus awake at night. The formula company probably did that on purpose, put caffeine in the powder so the baby would wake up and you’d have to feed them more and more formula. That was how the world worked. Mercenary. Nothing to be done about it.
One day, Ali saw a flyer from a big U.S. chicken company advertising farm jobs in Indiana, America. No English required. “Get cash your first day,” it said. A new beginning away from everyone’s thin performances of rage, grief, pity—that became, in an instant, all he wanted in the world. A chicken hadn’t shot his wife out of the sky. Ali took the flyer down, folding it into his pocket.
A month later, they moved together, the widower and his sleepless king. Ali had sold everything in Iran or given it away—his TV and furniture, his military pistol and Roya’s wedding dress, a pearl brooch and two Pahlavi gold coins. They brought to their Fort Wayne apartment only what they could fit in a single trunk—bowls, clothes, birth certificates. Ali’s military boots, which he figured he could use on the farm. A couple of crumpled doodles Roya made while nursing Cyrus—a windowpane at night, a giraffe. A small wedding photo: Ali and Roya sitting together under a white cloth lifted above them by a cast of relatives, Arash holding a corner, smiling warmly down at his sister. With all these, the trunk was barely half full. Ali did not cry when the plane took off from Tehran, but wept a little, silently, as it landed in Detroit.
Cyrus hardly slept on the flight, but when he did there were no terrors. He cooed a little. He seemed fascinated by what was happening, the vibration from the engines, the endless vistas of blue. The Shams men began their lives in America awake, unnaturally alert, like two windows with the blinds torn off.