The colonel’s wife knocked softly on the door and I must’ve answered because she walked in carrying a fresh towel and a rose-colored bathrobe. She rested them on the sink, pulled the shower curtain aside, and started the bath water running. She turned and looked down at me the way mothers do with young kids who are sick, and she smoothed my hair away from my face. It felt so good and bad that my eyes filled up and I had to look down.

“Please, have bath for to relax. I’m for us cooking. Perhaps you will wish to eat.”

She closed the door behind her. I stood to lock it, but I stood too quickly and the room seemed to pull me down and back. Through the door, I could hear water running in the kitchen sink, the colonel’s wife speaking over it in their language. Then I heard the lower voice of the colonel and I remembered him as a blur against the gray light, unloading Lester’s gun, putting it in his pants. Did I dream that? I didn’t know. A black sky opened up inside me. I felt so suddenly afraid, so far away from the solid feel of a real moment in my old life that I couldn’t move. I had a feeling about my chest, and I touched my fingers to my sternum. I could feel a tenderness: the barrel of Lester’s gun, and I started to cry and I remembered the fat woman crying, me pointing the gun at her through the glass. And through the bathroom door I could hear silverware being pulled from a drawer. I could smell cooking meat, tomatoes and onions, and I thought I might throw up again, but I was too weak to get on my knees so I leaned my hands on the sink but nothing came. I looked into my reflection, saw the tear trails over the accountant’s daughter’s blush still smeared so pink into my cheeks, my eyes flecked with red veins, swollen underneath, my hair sticking out; I was so dirty, so deserving of everything bad that had ever come my way or ever would again. I jerked open the mirrored cabinet door. On the clean glass shelves were white boxes of Band-Aids and cold cream, tubes of antibiotic lotion, a jar of French aspirin, two small maroon boxes with Arabic or Persian writing on it, an alphabet of snakes. And on the lowest shelf, a brown plastic prescription bottle to Mrs. N. Behrani: Halcion. It was three-quarters full and my heart was beating in my fingertips, in the palm of my hands, my bowels loosening. I pressed down on the cap, turned, and pulled it off, my hands trembling, a chill up my arms and back, my nipples erect against a shirt I’d stolen from a girl, somebody’s daughter, one I would never have, a son either. Family waste. My road was a circle of shit, rising up to the west only to fall back to the east, to this, to taking off all my clothes in a stranger’s house, in the house of my father who was always a stranger to me, stepping naked over the carpet, running water in the sink. No more running, the tablets going down my throat like little embryos of solution. No enemy voices in my head, just a surrender to my cupped hands under the sink faucet as I drank and swallowed, seeing the cleaning calluses on my palms and wondering who will take over my clients’ cleaning? This is what I thought of as I stepped into the water that was so hot goose pimples came out on my skin; I was thinking: who will keep the houses and offices clean of filth? Who will be there to take on everyone else’s grit and dust and bad news? I lowered myself slowly in, my spine softening in the heat, my hands clammy on the porcelain bath. With my bare foot, I pushed the faucet knob in and shut off the water. Through the bathroom door I could hear Mr. and Mrs. Behrani speaking in that tongue that sounded older than the earth. No longer malicious voices to me. No great malice to accuse anyone of. Water dripped from the faucet into the bath and for a while I listened to each individual drop as it hit, the plimp of them. Their plimp, plimp, plimp. I began to count them. When I reached thirty-six, I started over, each drop a year getting sucked by gravity into everyone else’s years, and thirty-six may as well be a hundred. I closed my eyes to a darkness that no longer moved, and I kept counting but did it from 1957 this time, ’58, ’59, and I hoped the colonel’s wife wouldn’t blame herself too badly. I hoped she’d lay me down on her brass bed in my and Nick’s old room on those nice carpets—’70, ’71—she’d wrap me in lamb’s wool, and try to make me up as beautiful as her daughter. And they’d stand around me in the candlelight and speak in their old tongues. Mothers and daughters. Blood and breasts—’90, ’91, ’92—and the milk is for everyone. Please drink.

Please.

Please?

IT IS CLEAR TO ME ONCE AGAIN THAT MY NADEREH IS MOST HAPPY when called upon to serve and nurse the weak. While this Kathy Nicolo bathes herself in the washroom, I sit on a stool at the counter and watch my wife carry the steaming dishes of rice and obgoosht to the sofreh laid out upon the carpet in the living-room area. She has surrounded it with our fattest pillows from Tabriz, and she scolds me in Farsi to please remove the newspapers, glue, and mending table from the area, her voice still charged with the sense of purpose that lifted her from the darkness of her bedroom when I told her of the desperate girl under our roof. When I revealed the pistol she slapped me hard upon the shoulder and rushed to put on her robe, telling me in Farsi, “This is your fault, Behrani. You have done this.”

But since that moment, she has spooned no more blame onto my plate. She is deeply occupied in her tasks, setting the mastvakhiar and bread upon the sofreh, placing a damp towel over the rice pot to keep the steam imprisoned there, and she hums a love song by Googoosh, as if there were not a pistol and fully loaded magazine upon the countertop, as if the woman inside our washroom had not actually attempted to turn it on herself in our drive earlier today. Nonetheless, Nadi’s elevated mood helps my own, for she becomes quite beautiful when she is filled with the feeling she is needed, and I am of course hoping her beauty will further soften this Kathy Nicolo, that, and a traditional Persian meal and our forgiveness of what she had come here to do—well then perhaps, after all this, she and her friend Lester V. Burdon may be more willing to leave us alone, to aim their anger instead at the county tax men who took from her this home.

In my office, I carefully lay Nadi’s mother’s table on its face upon the floor. Kathy Nicolo is silent within the bathroom and I feel indecent to have taken note of this. I return to the kitchen and living-room area and sit at the counter. Between the steaming dishes upon the floor Nadi has placed three lighted candles in a small candelabra upon the sofreh, and she has extinguished the lamp near the sofa and the bungalow smells wonderfully of meat and saffron rice and cooked tomatoes. I have a large hunger and hope Kathy Nicolo presents herself very soon. I pick up the weapon once again. It is well maintained and smells strongly of gun oil. I pull backward on its ejection mechanism and allow it to slide back into position and the sound it makes startles Nadi and she nearly drops the warmed plates in her hands.

“Nakon, Massoud.” She tells to me to put the weapon out of sight of the poor girl, and I apologize to my wife for frightening her, but I do not yet put away the pistol for I am thinking of Friday afternoons during the months before Ramadan, when Pourat and I would use the firing range built by the Americans at Mehrabad. We would wear headphones and smoke French cigarettes and we would fire with one hand or two, attempting to shoot holes into the black silouhettes of paper men at the far end of the gallery. Pourat was not comfortable with his weapon, a 9mm pistol such as Kathy Nicolo’s, and he would jerk the trigger and miss the entire target, and his bullet would disappear into the sandbags against the concrete wall. But General Pourat did not care. He laughed at himself, even in the presence of the soldiers posted at the door, and he would give to me the weapon and I would allow him the use of my .45-caliber with the cowboy and rearing horse in its grip and Pourat would shoot even less accurately with that. But I was younger, my eyes clear, and many times I held my breath and squeezed the trigger and made a substantial number of holes in the chests and stomachs of the paper men. Later, Pourat would boast of my shooting to other officers. One year, all the spring season, he called me Duke Behrani after the American actor John Wayne, but of course Pourat’s laugh was always last, for in Farsi Duke sounds very much like our word for liar.