Name Them

Bahman 1394 · Jan–Feb 2016

Translated from the Persian original.

In the middle of winter I was driving, and since I'd only just gotten into the car, its parts were still cold and even the steering wheel had numbed the skin of my hands. The radio was on, and some guy, in the middle of a show like the usual phone-in quizzes, said to a listener on the phone, on the other end of the line: Name the reasons for such-and-such. I was used to reading that sentence on exam papers. Before I'd even reached the highway I saw a middle-aged woman with several fairly big plastic bags in her hands, waiting in the cold outside for a ride, and I trusted those very bags in her hands and stopped; who, in that cold, out to steal or with bad intentions, would have to lug around such cumbersome bags? She got in, and when she'd shut the car door she said thank you and immediately asked for a tissue, which she obviously wanted for her runny nose. I asked whether she went home at this time every night; she said she was going to work, said she was a nurse for an old woman and that night was her night shift, and it seemed she had bought some things for her too. I said it must be a troublesome job, dealing with an elderly lady who's probably very sick. When you're born, you're a ticked-off genetic list of the looks and brain and body that are your share; then you become your parents' checklist of wishes, the first of which is your name; and when our own wishes' turn comes, from some day on we gradually start to prioritize and cross out some of the wishes whose time and chance shrink by the moment. An old person is someone who probably crosses out one wish a day and keeps a close eye on the list and its details, and meanwhile, if they pay someone to see to their basic needs, the last person safe from their scrutiny and obsessiveness will surely be that very nurse. I was lost in these thoughts when the woman thanked me and told me to stop. I braked so she could get out, and she rolled down the window and threw one of the bags she had with her into the canal by the side of the street. Surprised, I asked what was in the bag; she said trash. I said, ma'am, people don't get into someone's car with trash, I thought you were going to the old woman's house. She said she was coming back from there, that the old woman had given her the bag to throw away there, and that this was actually part of her job. Feeling that I was being dragged into something against my will, I immediately asked in a commanding tone what was in those bags, and immediately regretted my question too, and before she could say anything I asked her to get out. Once the woman was out I warily kept watch all around to make sure no one had seen us, and once she'd gone I slowly turned off at the first street into an alley, switched off the headlights and stopped to think for a while, to make sure I hadn't made a mistake. Going back and checking the bag, or informing someone or some authority, was certainly not a wise thing to do, and I was neither that adventurous nor that responsible. On the other hand, curiosity, and this stupid faith that I must have been put on the path of this transfer for some reason, at least kept my mind busy with what could have been in the bag, and why there, and why anyone would want to do it in front of a witness at all. My dear, I went back home and had lost nothing but half an hour. I'm used to these scattered thoughts too, but always at bedtime a person has a whole heap of unsorted analyses they have to let go of in order to sleep, and I know there's a spiral behind the eye sockets where all these delusions spin and slide down to the bottom of something like that canal, and you fall asleep. The spiral's job is to make you then have a ridiculous dream that childishly ties all those thoughts and images of events together, so that in the morning you think it was basically just a dream. It's like this everywhere in the world. The bottoms of canals are the place for corpses that are meant not to be found, and this probably wasn't even the invention of the world's first murderer, but his simple imitation of the spiral of sleep. Sleep has the very nature of that canal: it chops excess memories into pieces and, by mixing them up, makes a nightmare or some ridiculous grotesque, and you wake up in the morning and say, well, thank God that was only a dream, like the soup a restaurant cook makes midweek from scraps and leftover ingredients, which is neither mushroom soup nor chicken soup nor has any other particular name; he himself calls it the soup of the day. And without a doubt the soup you like best is not the soup of the day. When you throw garbage in big chunks down to the bottom of this spiral of sleep, little by little its sharp, spiraling body wears away and gets polished, and your thoughts drop to the bottom of the well in whole blocks, and you no longer dream, and you're forced to actually live through the nights until morning too. Later I realized that the nurse was throwing the pieces of the old woman's sleep in different places so they wouldn't connect to each other.

Name the things you can connect to each other.

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