“Sure.”
Dad stepped into the kitchen and slid the door closed. It was this heavy wooden door, on a track so that it slid into a slot right behind the oven. I didn’t know anyone else who had a door like that.
When I was little, and Dad had just introduced me toStar Trek,I liked to call it the Turbolift Door. I played with it all the time, and Dad played too, calling out deck numbers for the computer to take us to like we were really on board theEnterprise.
Then I accidentally slid the door shut on my fingers, really hard, and ended up sobbing for ten minutes in pain and shock that the door had betrayed me.
I had a very sharp memory of Dad yelling at me to stop crying so he could examine my hand, and how I wouldn’t let him hold it because I was afraid he was going to make it worse.
Dad and I didn’t play with the door anymore after that.
I pulled down Dad’s bottle and set it on the counter, then popped the lid off my own and shook out my pills.
Dad and I both took medication for depression.
Aside fromStar Trek—and not speaking Farsi—depression was pretty much the only thing we had in common. We took different medications, but we did see the same doctor, which I thought was kind of weird. I guess I was paranoid Dr. Howell would talk about me to my dad, even though I knew he wasn’t supposed to do that kind of thing. And Dr. Howell was always honest with me, so I tried not to worry so much.
I took my pills and gulped down the whole glass of water. Dad stood next to me, watching, like he was worried I was going to choke. He had this look on his face, the same disappointed look he had when I told him about how Fatty Bolger had replaced my bicycle’s seat with blue truck nuts.
He was ashamed of me.
He was ashamed of us.
Übermensches aren’t supposed to need medication.
Dad swallowed his pills dry; his prominent Teutonic Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he did it. And then he turned to me and said, “So, you heard that Babou went to the doctor today?”
He looked down. A Level Three Awkward Silence began to coalesce around us, like interstellar hydrogen pulled together by gravity to form a new nebula.
“Yeah. Um.” I swallowed. “For his tumor?”
I still felt weird saying the word out loud.
Tumor.
Babou had a brain tumor.
Dad glanced at the turbolift door, which was still closed, and then back to me. “His latest tests didn’t look good.”
“Oh.” I had never met Babou in person, only over a computer screen. And he never really talked to me. He spoke English well enough, and what few words I could extract from him were accented but articulate.
He just didn’t have much to say to me.
I guess I didn’t have much to say to him either.
“He’s not going to get better, Darius. I’m sorry.”
I twisted my glass between my hands.
I was sorry too. But not as sorry as I should have been. And I felt kind of terrible for it.
The thing is, my grandfather’s presence in my life had been purely photonic up to that point. I didn’t know how to be sad about him dying.
Like I said, the well inside me was blocked.
“What happens now?”
“Your mom and I talked it over,” Dad said. “We’re going to Iran.”
