The bedroom balcony was like an island, deserted and warm despite the falling temperatures of the post-storm night. Daniel tried to lose himself in a book, to no avail. He had to think about what he had said to Khaiyam. He had to decide if the seed in his mind was worth watering or a poisoned kernel to be destroyed. Over the wall to the east, the lights were bright in Keshmesh’s house.
Daniel watched the boy’s father come home, draping his car with a tarp as meticulously as a mother tucking in her child. More remarkable was the flag that hung from Keshmesh’s balcony. Its black, gold, and green stripes were already blocks of memory, and Daniel wished he could chase away the red that now flew over the city.
Keshmesh emerged onto his balcony. Daniel raised his hand in salute, but the boy didn’t respond. They’d met countless times like this, the boy putting on goofy shows. There were no antics tonight, because Keshmesh’s father walked onto the balcony and began quarreling with his son. It ended with a loud admonition: “You have no idea how lucky you are, you ungrateful child.” He pulled the old flag up and bundled it in his hands, storming back inside while his son sulked. Over the other wall, in the road, Daniel could see a guard asleep in his Jeep, already bored with his revolution.
Daniel went back inside, wondering if he would be able to sleep. He laid his pajamas on the bed and sat in front of the dresser, watching himself in the dimly lit mirror. The beard made him look older. His eyes were as they had always been, his pupils like two brown stones from his father’s mines.
His father’s mines. He had never felt they were his own, and fate had agreed. His flight was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Rebecca expected him. But he expected something else of himself now. He went downstairs to call her. He thought he would find Peter and Elias playing cards in the living room, lamenting their bad hands and applauding at trivial victories. Instead, he found Elias sitting there in the dark.
“Don’t,” Elias said when Daniel reached for the light switch.
They spoke for a while, the journalist rambling like a drunk man even though he was sober. He would not apologize for what he had believed in, he said, but he’d made one big mistake: assuming that men who had the same ideologies believed in the same things. But there was more to belief than ideology, wasn’t there, he wondered.
As Elias spoke, Daniel decided that tomorrow he would find Taj. It was the only thing that made sense.
Then, after Elias had gone to bed, he saw what Laila had done. She’d lined up empty bottles at the wet bar, with a handwritten note: We love you.
He picked up the receiver, relieved to finally hear a dial tone. Elizabeth Menlow answered on the first ring. She sounded strained, her voice thin and small, and once he had convinced her that he was all right and in no danger, she began to weep. “We’re all counting the hours until you arrive, dear,” she said.
He was going to tell her that he had to stay just one more week, but her next words weren’t what he expected. Rebecca was at St. Luke’s. Daniel jerked out of his chair. Elizabeth described the ambulance and the medics in detail. She talked about their accents and clothes, as if these things mattered. She said Walter was with Rebecca now, and that Elizabeth had come home only to pack some clothes and books for her. At least that was something, Daniel thought. Books. That meant Rebecca was alert and awake.
“Did she go into labor?” he asked. Laila had said three or four weeks ahead would be early but not catastrophic.
“No. At first they thought it was. Wait. There was something about early labor. But that’s not why she’s there.”
“Elizabeth, is Becca in labor or not?”
“Oh no, she’s not in labor, dear. They just need to keep her because of the complication.”
“What complication?”
“The one she had to go to the hospital for. She’s fine. I mean, there are no contractions, so don’t worry about that. That’s what the doctor said. He said don’t worry. About that . . .” She trailed off.
Daniel rubbed his eyes and began to pace, stretching the phone cord as far as it would allow. He asked for the number to St. Luke’s and Rebecca’s room. The phone rang twenty times. He tried the front desk and they connected him from there, but again, it only rang. He slammed down the receiver, then raised it back to his ear. Silence. The connection was down. He tried again and again to no avail.
He finally reached Rebecca at five the next morning after another fitful night. She sounded weak. She asked anxious questions, telling him how glad she was that he would be on a plane in a few hours. The revolution was on the news every night. CBS had interviewed Smythe, who assured everyone that things could proceed as usual for the time being. The new regime might not be impossible to work with, he said. Daniel had no interest in what Smythe thought. He wanted to know what was happening to Rebecca. When he thought about her, it made the regime change seem smaller.
“Remind me what time you’re landing,” she said.
There it was. “It’s actually going to be another week until I can come home. Just administrative things.” This was different from all the other things he’d kept from her. Everyone was careful with what they said over the phone now. But when he returned, he would tell her everything.
“It’s out of my hands,” he continued. It was true. He had two lives now, although he lived in a space in between them, a gray area that wasn’t gray at all, its spectrum made up instead of shades of red and green. “Becca, are you still there?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t believe you.”
“What do you mean?”
She hung up. When he tried to call back, the line was dead. Daniel tried again several times before lying down on the couch. For the next hour and a half, Elias silently read the Koran, absorbed like a student who had at last found a philosophy with the answers he’d been seeking, while Peter barricaded himself upstairs with his typewriter. Daniel was sure he would always associate these days with that clicking sound. Every time he thought about Khaiyam, he wanted to go back up the stairs of that crooked building and correct the mullah on one point. Daniel wasn’t worthless without his inherited wealth; he could still offer something.
As he waited for the clock to strike seven, he tried to distract himself with small pleasures and tasks. He ate an orange. He rearranged his LPs alphabetically. He picked up random books, thumbing through a few pages of Death in Venice, which he found boring and a little twisted. He drank, but only a little. It helped with the pain, especially when he mixed it with tiny bits of opium. Finally, he looked at his watch. It was time to go. He checked his beard, makeup, and turban, still unused to working its layers and folds, which only looked right with Firooz’s help. He hoped he would be able to find Taj. He wondered what the khan would say when he saw Daniel in his disguise. Walking through the living room, he was taken aback by his father’s glare. He seldom noticed the portrait. Today, the bespectacled eyes followed him even after he left the room. He slipped out of the house and mounted one of the bikes. He felt Telaya’s mirror shift in his pocket.
Daniel reached the Silk Road at eight thirty. Tucked away on the outskirts of town, it was a place he never thought he would visit. Like the Zoroaster, it could only be found by those who knew where to go. It stood alone on a concrete slab, surrounded by a patch of desert on a dusty road. He hesitated. If he was slipping into some kind of madness, so be it. He pushed open a ragged screen that led into a hallway without a ceiling. At the end was a heavy door. He tapped several times and waited for what seemed like an eternity before a gleaming eye appeared in the peephole. A sleepy voice asked what he wanted.
“I’m looking for a friend.”
More questions. The portal unlocked and the hinges creaked open. A young man led him inside. Organized in a tidy row were loafers, oxfords, sandals, and heels. Even a pair of cowboy boots. Two armed men searched him. They asked if he had come to smoke. No, he said. He just wanted to talk to a friend who might be here. He followed them through a restaurant, crossing the kitchen, and was ushered through another creaking metal door at the end of a hallway. They gave him five minutes.
The smell of bitter sweetness rushed toward him. The opium den looked nothing like the image painted on its ceiling, a gilded fresco depicting a harem where women drank from goblets, turbaned men enveloped in twirling smoke and lustful girls. The space was dimly lit by sconces, the flames making shadows jump on the walls. Plush cushions lined the edges of the room. Scattered around were ottomans and low tables. There was no music, only hushed whispers and peaceful breathing.
No one seemed to notice Daniel as he moved about the room, not even those who looked straight at him. The fevered ones were lost to warm dreams and each other. One of the paradoxes of opium was that people could feel deeply connected to others while enjoying a sense of sublime solitude. Or so he’d heard when he was a boy eavesdropping on his father’s servants. It wasn’t the kind of information you found in USADE handbooks. He felt like an intruder.
Taj Maleki was known to many in the room. Most had heard his name, and some had even seen him, but they all described him in different ways. Sometimes he was tall, other times short. So he had sent decoys. Ingenious. When Daniel asked where he lived or how often he came here, the Fevered Ones looked at him as if his questions had no answers. He approached a couple playing chess with marble pieces that were as green as the smoke, and they smiled like Daniel was the person they’d been waiting for. The woman told him no one saw Taj Maleki anywhere outside the Silk Road.
“Doesn’t he sometimes meet people at the Zoroaster?” Daniel said.
The couple smiled. “Nobody here goes to a place like that.” They went on to explain that other Manticores sometimes came here, too, but there was no agreement on the names of these men or their appearance. They came now and then to ask their customers if they liked the latest sample and wished to arrange a regular purchase. “There’s no predictability to their visits.” Manticores came and went in rhythms known only to them.
“How often do you come here?” Daniel said.
“How often . . .”
He scribbled his name and number on napkins, handing them to everyone. “If you see him,” he said, “tell him it’s important.”
The guards searched him again before he left. He was glad to walk out into the sunlight and leave the addicts to their fever dream where opium was the beginning, middle, and end. It was a place without time, a place without place. Daniel envied them.