Slavery

Farvardin 1395 · Mar–Apr 2016

Translated from the Persian original.

Years ago I read somewhere that in Iran each person works for eleven people. I have no interest in political or social debates, but let's extend this to people's happiness. First, let's think a little about whether this is even a fair comparison or a false analogy. For every person who is happy here, how many are upset, sad, depressed, lonely, disheartened and hopeless? My skill is writing bitter things, so forgive me if I write bitterly about what I think matters. She found her way into my home; I invited her myself. In truth, I stirred excitement and trust in her and got close to her, which is what men in general do. She had the most beautiful eyes in the city, and the most apple scent in paradise, and the most heart-devouring mouth in the world, and the most blood-colored lips in existence, the neatest white teeth for swallowing all my strength to run away; she shone like a star and held me motionless on the couch for minutes, and in that moment I felt, with my whole being, what it is to be chosen, on the scale and at the level of the president of a republic, and with the quality of a penguin for a year of coupledom. Inside, I grew so big that if the moon had been full my werewolfery would have relapsed. I don't know from what divine, satanic, Luciferian or Ahrimanic force I drew the strength to manage to say a few words. I saw her three times, and on the third night she told me she wanted to leave me. And I, still brimming over with that same measure of pleasure, let her go, but something in me had changed; for a long time I took her for a spy who had come to steal something from inside me and hand it over to the aliens. Aliens, just like us, search their own planets for things that either don't exist on Earth, or do exist and are of some use. I believe I had a specimen of those stones inside me. After a few months of thinking about her every now and then, I saw a sign in Tehran which I must refrain from describing, but it drove me to contact her again. She came again, and without thinking I asked, why did you leave? She said, you weren't the person I thought you were. Of course, the right question was, why did you come back? I thought to myself maybe she couldn't bear it and had fallen in love with me too; later I thought she had taken the wrong stone to space. Time went by, and I, who loved her with my whole being but, for the very reason you know, had no faith at all that she would stay, tried only to make the most of the time, and I even told her that whatever day you leave again, I won't have the slightest complaint or regret left about the days before. Until one night I was asleep and the phone rang. Someone claimed to be from the moon, and he had a sickly, unnatural voice. I laughed, hung up and switched the phone off, but he called the same phone again and said, you have taken a slave of ours on the moon and you must give her back to us. A little frightened, I said, I live alone and I think you're mistaken, and patiently, calmly, he told me the whole story and asked me to persuade the girl to go back, because on the moon she has a husband and a family. I asked the man what all this was for, why had they sent someone and now asked such a hard thing of me; he said, she'll explain it to you herself. When the call was over, the sun began to break, and I felt I hadn't slept in years. The next day when I saw her she told me the call was true and that she had a family, and that she had come into me to steal a stone, and when she took it to the moon she had talked to them and told them she was leaving them for Earth, and she had come back for me. I no longer knew what could be believed. I asked, what happens if you don't go? She said they would cut off her power, which is supplied from the moon; she said her essential being draws its energy from the moon. I said, can anything be done? I've grown dependent on you. She said no. Unless you're willing to feed me from your own being. I was glad, but with some hesitation I asked, how? She said every human has a stone inside, and you earthlings call it the soul. They had found out that two souls lived in me, and one of them belonged to a great person who, years ago, at the time of death, had fled to the moon and had had no choice but to put it in your body. She named the person, and I must refrain from saying who. And now they had to take it back to the moon for their research, and now you have only one soul, and if you want to keep me alive, things will get very hard. I said, I'll bear any hardship, life without you means nothing to me. She said, you can give me your soul, and each time you see me I'll instill a little of it back into you, and without thinking I said, my love, you left the moon and your family for me, of course I'll do anything to keep you, and I let her suck my soul out of me. At first everything was fine, then she wanted more from me, and now she was carrying them piece by piece to the moon and testing them. Sometimes, to tear off the pieces of me that still clung to me, she would humiliate me, and suddenly my pride would come loose and she'd vacuum it into her bag; or she would tell me things about myself and give me a new belief about myself, and pick up the old belief that fell to the ground and send it to the moon, and I, who needed my own soul in her body to live, had become her slave. Until one day I picked myself up and injected myself with a poison that I'd heard from her is unstable and dangerous on the moon, and she had a fight with me and left. When she left she had taken my tear sac, but there was still room for luck: she had left my brain to take at the very end. I saw that, counting my soul, she had taken eleven of my organs; some she had taken to the moon and some she was using herself. I remembered that each person worked for eleven; it's like slavery, and now it seemed that for years I had been her slave eleven times over, eleven times the slave of just one person, and she's still out there with my most important organ, and with it she gets inside people. She knows I'm of no more use to her, and she's looking for fresh meat.

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