You must see Persepolis. You must visit Esfahan where he did go but only to stock up on water and food. People told him about mosques of extraordinary beauty with extraordinary tile work but how could he enter?—all sweated up in shorts. And he wasn’t here as a tourist. His destination was Yazd, the city that would show him the heart of Zoroastrian belief. Into the very heart of Zorro. And despite all the hospitality (after that first night on the ground, he never slept under the sky again), and even though the armed men at the checkpoints were so happy to see him they offered most un-Western displays of affection, he wanted out. Nietzsche was winning. Marty was tired of the company of his fellow men, like the old man who wagged a finger at him and said in the darkest of tones “The Rockefellers!”, his view of capitalist evil as behind the times as his car. But in his family’s home after dinner his grandson played a Chris Rock DVD and Marty was sure no one in the house could understand the half of it, and not because of the English.
In the morning he rode for hours and saw men with their flocks of sheep, not a blade of grass in sight or a dwelling which made him wonder if they were even real.
That night after he bathed off the dust of the road, his host exclaimed, “Your hair is red! Your skin is white!”
Neighbors—men only—came to meet him.
“The CIA,” said a man. “Americans must live in fear. They watch you always.”
Maybe after this trip they would.
When he asked, some people changed the subject, others assured him Zoroastrians were not persecuted in Iran. “Persecution for the Bahá’i,” he was told. “For the Zoroastrian, discrimination only.”
In a coffeehouse that served only tea, a concerned father told him Cabbage Patch Kids carried concealed tape recorders.
“Dolls don’t spy on people,” Marty said. A lie, he realized, there were those nanny cams.
The man said, “They play a message telling children to jump out the window. As if the war didn’t destroy one generation, the dolls are meant to kill the next. But the Zionists aren’t that clever. Most of us live on the ground floor. Our children can jump out of windows all they want!”
More brown desert. More of the same. Then white earth like salt or chalk and a pool of turquoise water unless it was a hallucination and dust dust dust until he got to Yazd.
A city of rock-hard mud. Bumps and mounds channeling underground water. Sparrows taking their dirt baths in the dust. He couldn’t remember when he’d last shaved. His beard growing in curly and more red than auburn or chestnut the way Zoroaster looks in the images, same as Jesus. Was it sacrilege to let his hair grow?— like Zoroaster carved in stone, his hair flowing.
In the center of town, a stooped old man disturbed the dust in front of the coffeehouse with a broom made of twigs. Was it sacrilege to complain about the heat? It left Marty stupefied and reeling. But the sun was cosmic fire. The sun, along with the vultures, purifies the Zoroastrian dead. The corpses laid out for Sky Burial at the Tower of Silence, the dakhma. But the only towers he saw stood tall to catch the desert wind. There, someone directed him, at the top of the hill, the dakhma, over there.
The Tower of Silence wasn’t really a tower and it wasn’t silent—tourists even here—and it was no longer used. Viewed from below it looked like a furnace or a water storage tank or a big round baseball stadium made of stone. A deep aboveground well. To reach the dakhma, he had to climb. He left his bike on its side in the dirt. From the hillside he turned back to the panorama of brown buildings, brown earth, brown apartments under construction with dark brown holes staring out from eight floors of windows still waiting for glass. Maybe no one would ever move in, he thought, afraid their children might jump. At the top gazing into the dakhma he looked down into a pit of rubble. Reminding him of something. Lightheaded now he sat, took water from his pack. Below, it was just brown and more brown. A transmission tower stood against the horizon and he felt the most profound sadness he had ever known. Not mere depression. This must be the dark night of the soul, something his soul had surely been demanding year after year and, being medicated—damn his mother!—year after year had been denied.
There was a flash of light—inside of him, he thought, not outside, and then the air went cold and black. He was a pulse pulsing in the void. Not a cobweb brushing his face, not even an ant or spider on his leg, there was nothing, nothing to tell him he was not alone. He fell and lay flat on the earth, the blasphemed earth, his face pressed against it and the earth spoke to him. Without words the earth reminded him of rubble and craters and bombs, the high school field trip to the Nevada Test Site, and of the first time he ever saw Brent Fassen. Marty sat in the campus theatre What to do what to do what to do I have to do something. Then the retreat because he wanted to learn to do more. Brent’s voice determined and serene: The time is now, the situation urgent. How committed are you? How far would you go?
Was it up to him now to tell someone? His body shook. He cried. And out of the nothing a hand touched him.
“You are American?” said the voice. “You’ve seen the Towers.”
He still couldn’t speak so he gestured toward the dakhma and nodded.
“We are so sorry,” said the stranger. “Your Towers are gone.”
The rough hand took his and Marty winced, unhealed blisters. The man led him down. Marty retrieved his bike, wheeled it along, and hand in hand they went, like father and son, back to town.
In the coffeehouse, men were gathered around tables, watching. The television mounted high on the wall beamed out images, sent out its light. The sweeper with his homemade broom stood in the doorway, watching, too.
“Look,” said his guide. “Muslims and Zoroastrians crying together, with you, our Christian friend. Our American.”
A man shouted, “Look! Look what Israel has done!”
Men were crying and praying, hitting their own chests, tearing at their own clothes and Marty couldn’t understand until suddenly he did. Again the world vanished. It slipped away, sucked into a sponge that a huge hand covered and squeezed dry. Nothing left but holes. He saw nothing. Heard nothing. There was no sound. The world was empty until something entered, not revelation, only an acrid smell. Just as suddenly sound came back. A rushing wind that said Do something.
“The Jews will say we did it,” said a man.
The wind said It it it.
Someone said, “Please when you go home, tell your country it wasn’t Iran.”
“Don’t let there be a war, Inshallah.”
“Let there be justice, Inshallah.”
“But Inshallah, no war.”
“The Jews are behind it.”
His thigh burned as though the Reisepass rested against him in his pocket.
“Israel did it. Let them bomb Israel.”
Israel, as responsible for this, he thought as a Cabbage Patch doll. Some people, he thought, will believe anything. And the film—it had to be the trailer for a disaster movie. The men were crying real tears, but what they were watching…It couldn’t be real.
Respect the enemy in your friend, said Nietzsche, which meant you do your friend the honor of never trusting him.
Someone asked, “Are you a Christian?”
He’d been one, more or less, when he met Brent Fassen who said, “Christians do NOT deny our role in climate change. Christians see evolution as one more proof of the limitless creativity of God.” And Marty had approached and shook his hand and coughed to cover up a nervous laugh. He quoted Nietzsche: After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
“Because it made him realize he was dirty,” said Brent Fassen.
The world was dirty now with black smoke. Cinders and ash. If there’s a battle between good and evil, how do you tell which is which? He felt himself floating, leaving his body behind and then plunging back inside to all the pain. Flesh hurt, soul hurt. I have to do something, he thought.
On the TV, it was playing over and over and over again, recurrence, the eternal return, and now the men watched in silence, mesmerized. Smoke and rubble and dust and death.
If he were a righteous man, he would say, My friends, I’m a Jew.
“I’m not a Christian,” he said. “I’m a Zoroastrian. Or I want to be.”
They watched the planes. Nothing, he understood nothing. The endless loop with its cryptic demand.
An old man followed him outside. “We are very poor here,” said the man. “The Parsis in India are our support. If you wish to learn about our Prophet, you must go to Mumbai.”
So he was still on the run. Bus to Shiraz. Flight to Doha—if planes were allowed to fly—and from there, India.
“Please,” he said, “I want you to have this bicycle.”
“I cannot accept it.”
“But I want you to.”
“You are my guest. I can take nothing from you.”
“It is offered freely. As the Prophet said, Doing good to others is not a duty, it is a joy, for it increases our own health and happiness. Please.”
The old man ran a hand over the frame, gently but firmly, as though touching a prized horse.
Nietzsche was right. The true man acts. The true man goes beyond the foolish strictures of good and evil. So what? Marty made up his mind. He would become Mardan—or Marzban, and he would henceforth walk in righteousness even if Zorro was his own creation and Zoroaster’s truth was lie.