Published in by indie literary magazine 34th Parallel

The Iranian Swimmer

The weekend had been going well until Hassan disappeared while swimming.  The night before, he and Alicia had driven down from Boston in her flashy red convertible and had enjoyed a pleasant dinner with her parents. He had aced that, in fact. They seemed not to be perturbed by his Iranian origins, as other American suburbanites sometimes were, but were completely engaged by him, his social graces and (of course) his Aryan good looks. Charming other people’s parents was something that came easily to Hassan: elites connect after all—even across enormous geographic and cultural distances—and drawing upon his country’s millennia of civilization, plus his shiny English veneer gleaned from several years at a boarding school, he could charm the pearls off anyone’s mother.

After their family dinner Alicia’s stepfather had retired to his study to complete some work on an important legal case, while her mother chatted with them in the living room. She had gone to bed at around 10:30 and Alicia and Hassan had strolled down to the beach. There had been little moon but the sea glistened nonetheless, and the beach seemed to have a certain sparkle all of its own. After a half hour or so they had climbed the stairs back to the house and made hot chocolate and had sat in the upstairs den talking until nearly two in the morning. Hassan’s room was down the corridor from Alicia’s, and the first thing in the morning he knocked on her door and persuaded her to get up, if not to actually accompany him on his morning swim.

Their house was a classic New England Victorian, magnificently sited on a low bluff overlooking the wide mouth of an estuary. Its Queen Anne turret rose above the foliage of a near-by pine tree whilst the rest of its stately bulk was neatly hidden from the beach by a mix of deciduous trees. The blue of the water in front of the house looked icy in the June sun, which, although gaining strength in the early morning, was not quite warm enough to coax canny locals into the estuary to bathe. But Hassan was undaunted. His tolerance for cold water was higher than that of most ordinary human beings.

“Its my British education that I have to thank for that,” he told Alicia as he slung his towel over his shoulder and headed down the stone path towards the beach. “It knocks the wimp right out of you.”

“So manly!” Alicia watched him, as she hugged her knees in the oversize porch chair, sipping on a mug of coffee.

Hassan had told his friend Eddie about Alicia only a few days before this trip down to her mother’s place on the cape.

“She’s incredible, Eddie,” he had told him. “There’s just an uncanny connection that we have, you know? She’s charming, funny, smart, you name it, and she’s beautiful, too.”  Eddie looked dubious. “If it was anybody but you saying those things I would be happy for them, in an uncomplicated sort of way.” Hassan sighed. “Oh here we go again,” he said.  Eddie continued: “But sooner or later she’s going to want you naked in her sack.”

“Oh its not like that.”

“Everything is like that,” Eddie said. “That’s life in the real world, my friend, its put out or get out. I mean where do you think she thinks this is going? Huh? A good-looking (sort of), educated, single man….a colleague, who she likes and admires and—fancies? I tell you she’s not looking for a platonic relationship, man. Sooner or later your little ship of denial is going to run up against the rock of reality.”

Eddie had seen it all before with Hassan: The well-heeled college girls, easily impressed by this super-sensitive Iranian man with the sleek good looks and an international education. Hassan’s almost-unconscious habit of making himself their confidante, getting inside their thoughts and soliciting their deepest secrets, unsettling them with his attentions, and then, finally, when the bait is set and the prey is ready to enter—nothing but an awkwardness and confusion resulting in estrangement.

Hassan dismissed Eddie’s cynicism; just more of his friend’s two-dimensional narrow mindedness. Eddie’s whole mindset, in fact, was the problem with society these days. Maybe it was a peculiarly American problem; the New World was so unwaveringly black and white, as if all things were only ever thus and not so, could only be one thing and never another, as if the universe of human experience was pristine, devoid of cagey shadows, free of doubt. What it needed was some of the ancient world’s give-and-take, some polymorphic propensity. You bet your life that Alexander the Great, having chopped a few dozen enemies into dog food, stopped for lunch and a quick romp with several of his concubines, found time in his schedule to get cozy with an attractive young boy from time to time. And what would that have said about his otherwise beyond dispute masculinity? American mainstream society, it seemed to Hassan, was too hung up on these rigid definitions of Man and Woman, of Masculine and Feminine, of Gay and Straight, and although he had lived here for years, and felt largely acclimatized to his surroundings, he never quite shook the perception that there were some intrinsic differences about him—that he was in the end a foreigner—and those differences might as well have included an extra set of legs for all intents and purposes. And this issue of sexuality was, perhaps, a part of it.

“Its about people,” he explained to Eddie. “Its people I love, not men or women; the shape of their bodies is irrelevant, the specifics of their appendages do not concern me.”

“Except if they’re breast-shaped,” was Eddie’s response.

“Its not their bodies I’m interested in, whatever sex,” Hassan said.

“You just refuse to recognize that you’re afraid of women,” said Eddie.

But from the country that was supposed to have liberated women, the country that gave birth to counter-culture, to Dykes on Bikes, to the notion of legislating civil rights, this brittle obsession with gender roles—the need to be all man or all-woman was ante-antediluvian and hypocritical.  The point was that he liked Alicia, he felt good around her and she certainly seemed to enjoy his companionship. What was sex, anyway? True, he had found himself in compromising situations before when he had allowed himself to get too close to a woman, but the truth was that he loved women—he just did not particularly enjoy sex with them; it was somehow messy, not only physically, but it did something alarming to the finely-calibrated boundaries between people, changed the partner into something almost unrecognizable, something foreign, something in the end a little less human. For Hassan the connection between two people was greater than the exchange of bodily fluids, more than the base gratification of physical urges. True companionship was ethereal, was spiritual, was of the heavens not of the earth, as the Persian poets well knew—this talk of physical indulgence, of intoxication and union, just a metaphor for what was, ultimately, a deeply spiritual experience—the knowledge of God.

Hassan entered the water gingerly at first, pausing as it rose over his upper thighs, tickled the underside of his testicles, causing him to suck in his stomach and wince. Then, remembering that Alicia was probably still watching him from her perch on the porch, he held his breath and forged ahead into deeper water until his feet lifted off the sand on the sea bed and his body achieved buoyancy in the achingly cold liquid. The mouth of the estuary where Alicia’s house stood was probably a quarter of a mile across, he guessed. He had left his glasses next to his bed, not wanting to lose them in the water, and all he could make out of the other side of the estuary was some wavy grass and a thin strip of gold which he took to be a beach or a sand bar.

He was used to long swims; he had been getting up early recently and driving out to Walden Pond where he swam in the company of the triathlon trainees. They went much faster than he did, timing themselves with water-proof chronometers, swaddled in rubber suits to preserve body heat. He, on the other hand, crossed the pond in a leisurely freestyle, clad only in a pair of loose boxer shorts, occasionally reverting to an energy-saving kind of backstroke in which he just kicked his legs. But he enjoyed being around these athletes, joking with them as they suited-up, or stripped to get dressed for their work days, and he admired their sinewy bodies, free of excess flesh. They were a can-do group of people whose optimistic attitude was attractive to Hassan who felt like a complex, cynical creature in comparison. And the literary setting added something to the experience, something that everybody seemed to feel—a sense that one was in greater harmony with nature than would ordinarily be possible in any old pond. For Hassan, Walden had an extra special appeal as Thoreau’s transcendentalism was so intimately connected to the to the old world and the centuries of accumulated wisdom to be found there, beginning in the heart of the fertile crescent and sweeping out towards India and China, including, of course the sages of Persia, and sometimes as he swam he recalled Thoreau’s use of Sheikh Sadi’s words from the Gulistan: Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Baghdad after the race of Caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the Cypress.

Hassan had been so enamored of Walden that, after quitting his PhD program, he had sent a proposal to a small local educational non-profit, suggesting they build some curriculum projects around the history of the pond, and they called him in for an interview, with a view to offering him a fundraising job. The interview had gone well—that is, until the two female principals had called in their male colleague, whose first question had been: “Do you like working with assholes?” The man’s confrontational stance had brought out Hassan’s more idiosyncratic, combative side, perhaps that had been his intention, and the interview had gone downhill from there. As it came to an end Hassan found himself saying that he could only work there if he could bring his dog to work. What kind of dog, they had asked, looking at him quizzically. Hassan did not actually have a dog, although it was his firm intention to get one in the future.

Before he struck out for the other shore, Hassan cast a glance behind him. The house was mostly hidden from the beach—from where he was standing he could just make out the porch, although his vision at that distance was too blurred for him to be able to tell whether or not Alicia was still sitting on her chair. On the beach there was a small wooden boathouse with a blue door, and he made a mental note to use that as a landmark should he lose his bearings in the long swim; the blue door should stand out nicely against the beach. With the image of the blue door seared into his mind he struck out with an energetic crawl, burying his face in the frigid bosom of the ocean and churning the water with his feet. He soon fell into a steady rhythm, coming up for air every second stroke, on his right-hand-side, and using his hands to best effect as they scooped the water in front of him, drawing it down past his torso, and releasing it as his hands emerged again, scattering droplets, by his backside. He focused intently on trying to develop a rhythmic kicking motion with his feet—something he had always found difficult with this stroke, he was either going too fast or too slow, his feet reverting to an anemic twitch every so often. Still, with the pull he was exerting with his hands he found he was making tolerable progress when he looked up after a couple of minutes, and saw that he had put perhaps a hundred and fifty yards between himself and the beach. The wind was causing a slight ripple on the surface of the water making the going somewhat more tiring than it otherwise would be, and the cold of the sea water was taking longer to get used to than he had anticipated.

As he swam his mind wandered, like a visitor to an art gallery wandering from room to room with no direction and no agenda, map-less and adrift. He found himself back in his family’s village in Iran. Several years ago now, his father had taken him back  for the first time since the revolution and they had driven to the south to see what had once, and for generations, been their family estate. His father had walked him to the top of a hill overlooking the valley in what had been the killing fields of the war with Iraq, and had shown him a great swathe of land stretching from horizon to horizon, shimmering under the brutal sun, blurred and boundless and beautiful, once, but turned, in Hassan’s view at least, into a blood-drenched cemetery now.

“That.” His father had said, gesturing. “That was our land.”

“I don’t care about what was, Bawbaw,” Hassan told him. “What is ours now?” But there was nothing now. The dozens of villages which had comprised the estate, and the thousands of acres of farmland, were now in public hands, seized by the government, or re-sold. And the same was true of the twenty-acre plot in the middle of Tehran which had belonged to his great-grandfather—government property, worth millions, locked up in a legal battle that would likely last for decades. Not a pomegranate tree to show for it. His father shrugged and loped off down the hill, his shoulders sagging visibly under the weight of what should have been such as promising life that had turned bad, and the exile they had hoped would be temporary, twenty-five years before—a lifetime ago.

In the darkness inside his head, as he swam with his eyes shut tight against the sea water, Hassan saw his father sitting eating pistachio nuts and drinking tea in the bazaar in Tehran; a chubby, small-framed man now, not like the physically imposing individual he had been in Hassan’s youth. He saw his mother in her house in Newton, saw the endless distance between them, saw the reason why his father could never tolerate life here, in a foreigner’s country where he could find no work that would dignify him, and he saw the damage done to him by his homeland’s abrupt upheaval. Hassan and his brothers had felt the shock waves all their lives too; the demands made on them to fit in to the Englishman’s schools; the demands that they tolerate being called Pakis by their schoolmates; the painful awareness that the very thing that validated their father—his role as provider—had been stolen from him along with his manhood, neither one to be fully recouped. From the image of his mother alone and growing old in the shell of their family house, his mind jumped to Alicia, remembering when he had first met her, that day four months ago when she had walked into the office and he had given her the job half an hour later. She had a certain poise that reminded him in a peculiar way of his mother. He knew it was unprofessional—hiring her like that—but he’d never felt so much power, he had never been in a hiring position before. The non-profit he had ended up managing—a tiny, embryonic offshoot of a bigger think-tank at Harvard—gathered news and information about repression in Middle Eastern countries. Alicia had told him about her father’s Lebanese grandfather, and her interest in the region engendered by his origins. After hiring her he had taken her to lunch in Harvard Square and they had lingered over their pan-Asian noodles, discussing her year abroad in Florence and Venice, the meaning of the mysterious letters in the Qur’an, and his childhood in Tehran. Students came and went in the restaurant, full of the talk of books. She was younger than him by quite a few years, and he understood that his older-graduate student-cum-teaching assistant act was beyond its sell-by date, even if he still felt that way. He was around students all day long, yet he was not one of them, neither was he a professor. He had quit his Ph.D over three years before, nauseated by the restrictions, hypocrisies and pretense of academia and drawn to real-life and its rougher edges, even if the resultant lack of career direction occasionally grated on him.

He reached the bank on the other side of the estuary, finally, having slowed to a more sustainable breast-stroke, and he crawled up on the wet sand and sat, facing Alicia’s house. He could still pick out the blurred fuzz of blue which must have been the boat house door. Miraculously he had swum a relatively straight line—something he found particularly difficult while doing the crawl. He allowed himself several minutes to regain his composure and recover some of the considerable energy he had expended in the crossing; the water had been colder than he had bargained for, and whereas he thought he would quickly get used to it, he found he was almost shivering upon arrival at the sand bar. To his right, towards the estuary mouth, was a sand bank next to which a noisy flock of gulls were arguing and diving into the water catching fish. There seemed to be no houses on this side of the estuary—not that he could see very far—but the shapes and colors meeting his retina were not suggestive of human habitations, instead there was a large expanse of low trees and brush, and then more sand dunes. He realized, looking at the acres of blue which also stretched in several directions, that he must be on a peninsular, possibly a tidal peninsular submerged at high tide, judging by the moist condition of the sand and the abundance of bones and shells and weed.

He let himself sit for ten more minutes, absorbing the rays of the warming sun, before a vague sense of anxiety, coupled with the thought of Alicia alone on her oversize chair, prompted him to launch himself into the cold water for the return journey.  He was more fatigued than he had counted on being at the outset of this swim, the cold water enervating him, but he struck up a steady crawl nonetheless since it was so much quicker than his breast stroke, even though the cold made his head ache. He began to recycle the previous night’s events in his mind: Alicia’s step-father’s initial, withering gaze, which Hassan had returned undaunted.

His father had always told him: “You are every man’s equal, so always look people in the eye—whoever they are.” In a sense it was about all he had, that sense of status—a status that had been catastrophically withdrawn by the hand of the revolution.  But it was about the only thing his father had ever told him that he took to heart. During dinner he had also felt Alicia’s gaze upon him while he was talking—performing, really—to her parents; explaining the mission of the institute, how he had come to work there; describing his family. On this subject, however, he held back more than he would have liked. He had not mentioned his father’s extended absences in Tehran, and their reason, nor his recently announced intention to cease commuting and settle permanently in the country of his birth, ridding himself of his filthy refugee status even though his entire family was American, now. Nor did he mention his own recent and unsettling realization that his family was a complete anomaly here, perhaps anywhere: three grown men, idle and adrift in one way or another, and one stalwart persevering mother—the glue binding them together. Most of all, however, he did not tell them of his older  brother’s “accident” last year,  which came after several years of debilitating depression during which he had camped in his parents’ basement, unemployed, addicted to pornography, and rapidly approaching middle age. His parents’ version, suicide being anathema to Muslims, was that someone had broken into the house at night and shot him in the head.  Hassan knew full well that his brother had pulled the trigger himself having raised the gun to his own temple; the bullet had miraculously missed his frontal lobe and had merely severed his optical nerve, leaving him permanently blind.

No, he had not mentioned any of this at dinner, speaking instead in the wide sweeps of generality which usually accompany initial encounters, and allowing a picture of a traditional family from the traditional world to form in the minds of his hosts. Alicia had thrown in nuggets of information from time to time, as if supporting Hassan’s narrative with examples, mentioning that he had attended a British boarding school, as if this bolstered his resume and enhanced him in her parents’ eyes. Walking on the beach afterwards he had reached out and touched her auburn hair which was glowing lightly and lifting in the breeze. She had turned and smiled at him, beatifically, and he had stopped. Inside, later still, they were cross-legged on the couch as they talked, her tank top loose, with no bra under it, her shorts exposing the insides of her golden thighs, and the tendons that ran up to her groin. She had suggested he sleep in her room—without being explicit about sharing the bed, but he assumed that is what she had meant—and he had claimed that he was tired and that he should probably respect her parents and not give them any ideas. She had remonstrated, clasping his hand, and claiming that they were “very modern,” and that she was an adult, besides. All the same, modern or not, Hassan had said good night, and with Eddie’s voice in his ears, he had retreated to the sanctuary of his own room.

As he slid through the water he felt a sudden a pang in his stomach, like a shot of adrenalin, as he envisioned Alicia naked, lying across her bed, her bare breasts small and pert, the nipples pink and pointy and raw like blood-filled ticks, like outrageous fruit; the image of her—her back arched, her rib cage pushing up and her labia exposed to full view, seemed to destroy everything beautiful about her in the daylight, clothed in the accoutrements of grace and style and elegance, it seemed to destroy the sense of purity and serenity she exuded, to give way to something foul and primitive and chaotic. He imagined the both of them in Eddie’s words, “naked, in the sack,” a rough, burlap sack, tied at the top, both of their sweaty, writhing bodies locked together in darkness, her mouth a gaping red orifice, her cunt a slimy hole, a cock-vacuum, aided and abetted by her long athletic legs which wrapped themselves around his buttocks and drew him in.

He shook the image from his mind and reared his head from the water, gasping for air and wiping the salt from his eyes. Then, after a few seconds he rolled onto his back and lay face up, staring at a few pale clouds above him, breathing heavily. When he lifted his head he attempted to focus on the shore and he realized that he had been so engrossed in his thoughts that he had forgotten to take frequent bearings on his direction. He could see the shoreline, although he was making very poor progress towards it, and try as he might he could see no blue boathouse door. He could barely make out any houses whatsoever, in fact, and as he bobbed in the slight swell which was coming from the mouth of the estuary he experienced a growing sense of panic. He looked back at the shore he had recently left. It was not far behind him, but it seemed to him that he had gone up-river— perhaps quite far up-river—and then he realized that he was in the middle of a fast-moving tide which was washing him away from Alicia’s house at an alarming rate. He put his head down again. This time he aimed himself down-river hoping to compensate for the tide’s strength, but he realized with a sinking feeling that he would have to swim much faster to make way against it. He focused again on his leg movements, knowing that if he was to maximize his swimming efficiency he needed to reduce drag from his feet by kicking in small fast movements and keeping them regular. But his legs seemed to resist this neurological command. They sagged in the water like two saturated logs. His arms arched out above and in front of him and his body rolled slowly to the side with each swing as the pulling arm described its arc from surface to surface, his hands molded into a shell-like cup. He kept his lungs full, exhaling slowly while his head was down and sucking in air again quickly when he rolled to the right.

He tried to keep his thoughts focused on his swimming motions, partly to assist his swimming and partly to prevent grotesque thoughts about Alicia from seeping back in. But no sooner than he thought about the need to focus his mind, Alicia’s face re-appeared, with an open, gaping mouth allowing him to see her insides, the bloody workings of the human body and all that it implied for its frail mortality. And then, as that image faded, he managed to replace it with another, more wholesome one of the rolling hills of his family’s estates, greens and golds and browns under the sun. But he could not hold this thought in mind for long before he envisioned it as a land flooded with a tide of martyr’s blood, blood that could have been his and his family’s if they had stayed, a swamp, alive with a fresh harvest of corpses, cut down as they grew from the slime by an army of black-cloaked Mullahs wielding scythes, the progeny of the revolution which had been unleashed upon the land to devour it whole. And he saw Alicia now, spread eagled on a bed, beneath one of the Mullahs, his black cloak hiked up around his hips and his hairy, brown buttocks pumping into her as she moaned and screamed.

It was a good twenty-five minutes before Hassan reached the shore. By now he was barely moving through the water, his arms throbbing from the exertion and the rest of him numb with cold. His legs found purchase on a rocky part of the sea-bed and he clambered up onto some boulders which lay scattered around the shore at the foot of a small cliff. As he negotiated these, with the little strength left to him, he sensed a sharp pain from his foot, and looking down he saw a shard of glass sticking out of it, and a thin, dark stream of blood running onto the rocks. He sat down heavily and took hold of the piece of glass, pulling it carefully out of his foot and throwing it away. Where it had been, there was a gash several centimeters long filling with blood.  He lay down on the smooth round boulder for a while gasping for breath and letting the sun re-kindle what fire had been extinguished inside him. After a few long minutes he sat up and looked myopically around him, noticing that his foot had begun to throb uncomfortably and was still bleeding. He did not recognize anything. The landscape itself was completely different to everything he had seen at Alicia’s house, and on top of that anything more than twenty feet away was a colorful blur. There seemed to be a building above him, looking over the bay, and he decided his only option was to go and find someone from whom to ask directions. It was impossible to walk up the beach, which consisted now of rough-hewn slabs of rock. He was not even sure whether the beach would lead him to Alicia’s house, or whether he had somehow entered another body of water entirely.

He climbed over the boulders on the shore, half limping, and soon found himself crossing a patch of grass which, he realized awkwardly, was someone’s front lawn, perfectly manicured and surrounded by mature plantings. The house which owned the lawn was an imposing structure, clad in the gray, weathered shingles of the local architectural style. But this fine detail was lost on Hassan who perceived a fuzzy slate-gray mass in front of him.   He approached it, aware that he did not look like the kind of visitor one would ordinarily expect, even on a summer’s weekend, and he fumbled with the front of his boxer shorts only to discover that his penis was sticking out of the hole in the front. He hastily closed the hole with the button. As he came within range of the house he saw on its right hand side that there was a garden gate with a pergola above it over which was trained a rose bush. He guessed that there would be a side door round the back, since he did not want to go to the front door—it somehow seemed too impertinent. The gate opened without a problem and he found himself on a brick path. There was indeed what appeared to be a kitchen door on the side of the house, but as he was about to knock on it, he heard voices from around the other side of the house and he stepped off the stoop and wandered around to find them. Around the backside of the house he entered a patio area with a café table, some flower pots and a grill set. Around the table were five people with blurred features apparently in the process of breakfast.

Into this secluded family oasis Hassan stumbled, naked but for his baggy, soaking boxer shorts which sported large purple love hearts—a gift from a former female friend—unshaven for the past forty-eight hours, and bleeding heavily from the foot. He stood with his blood-covered feet on the warm gray flag stones of the patio, squinting at the occupants of the patio like someone just released from long bondage in a dark cargo hold, as one by one the members of the breakfasting family (a father, a mother, a thirteen year old boy and a sixteen year old girl and an older woman, perhaps an aunt or a grandmother) slowly ceased their conversation and turned their heads in his direction. For a second, or perhaps several seconds, Hassan found himself mute; something about the tableau in front of him—its symmetry, its painful conformity and its undeniable strength—and his own inability to fix on any one individual to address, robbed him of speech. The vision presented by this family seemed to negate him entirely, to render him not exactly invisible, but irredeemably foreign to the extent of being a different species of human being, and he felt that there were no words in his possession that could possibly bridge the gap. As he stared, the mother stood up, her metal chair breaking the silence on the flagstones, and then the father stood up, his face a study in determination as he said, “Its alright Jenny, I’ll handle this.”

Hassan took a step forward, but as he opened his mouth to say something and explain his otherwise inexplicable presence in their garden, the flagstones came racing towards him and collided with his nose before he even had time to raise his hands and protect himself. Darkness followed for what seemed like an eternity, and Hassan wasn’t sure whether he was still swimming, or had finally succumbed to the dark, cold water and was resting on the bottom of the North Atlantic, a tropical fish far from its migratory path, or whether he was somehow back in his tiny studio apartment in Somerville in the dead of night. Then, before he could resolve the question of his whereabouts, he saw a man’s face perilously close to his, and then a woman’s, and a confusion of voices around him raised in alarm.

“Are you alright? Do you speak English?” The man was saying. “Habla Ingles?”

“Yes.” Hassan finally muttered, hearing his voice as from a great distance, “Yes, I do, I…I am. I’m sorry… I must have fainted.” His voice sounded foreign and weak to his ears, the voice of a wounded animal, and he cleared his throat in an attempt to regain his normal timbre, and re-establish himself as a civilized member of society.

“Who are you?” said the man, “Where do you come from?” Hassan recognized something not entirely welcoming in the man’s voice, not quite the concern one would have expected from one stranger bending over another incapacitated stranger, and he still spoke unnecessarily loudly as if to help him understand English. He clearly misunderstood the situation; he must have sensed a threat where there was none. Hassan struggled to sit up and begin to clear up the situation by announcing his relationship to Alicia’s family who were no doubt familiar to them as neighbors.

“I was swimming, I got caught in the tide, I was headed for the house up there, I think,” he pointed along the coast.

“This is the last house on this side,” the man said. “Perhaps you’re turned around.”

“There’s a blue boat house door, a big house set up above it on a hill, Forest, my friend’s name is Forest.” He paused, expecting to see recognition soften the man’s features, as his words sunk in and found their mark, but the man maintained his quizzical, vaguely threatening expression, and Hassan found himself struggling to come up with further landmarks, names and details that could serve to place him. But as he mentioned Alicia’s name again he realized that she did not share her stepfather’s name, and he did not know what that was. Undoubtedly the house was in his name, and her mother probably shared his name.

“I’m staying with the Forests, well, she’s a Forest, her stepfather’s something else, up the road, there. The people with a big Victorian house on the point…”

“What’s the name?” the man was saying, now, looking ever more resolute in his intention, “Their name?”

“I’m sorry,” Hassan said, sitting up and accepting the glass of water the older woman was giving him. “My friend’s mother is remarried, her stepfather, I don’t know his name.”

“Well, then, their street address? What address are you staying at, pal?”

He looked around at the family. They had moved towards him now and their features were more clear; the girl—pretty in a somewhat vanilla kind of a way, yet on the skinny side—with strawberry blond hair and an early-season suntan, was staring at him with her mouth slightly open. Hassan briefly wondered whether Alicia had been like that ten years ago. The boy was watching almost impassively, still eating a large bowl of cereal and looking on from suspicious, heavy-lidded eyes.

Hassan pushed himself up to a standing position. “I’m very sorry to trouble you,” he said. “I think I can find my way back from here. If you can show me to the road.” He made his way to the edge of the patio and turned the corner of the house; the man followed him a couple of steps behind, unsure, apparently whether to prevent him from leaving or encourage him. He kept walking, past the front of the house, until he saw the sun reflecting off cars, and beyond that what he assumed were the front gates. The husband and wife were both several steps behind him now, their attempt to keep up with him stalled, and they remained by the front door, watching him and talking in earnest, hushed tones to each other, debating their course of action.

The road on which he found himself existed in a world beyond his immediate power to visualize. There were blob-like structures back from the road some fifty to seventy feet—houses, he presumed, but it was equally possible that they were office buildings, possibly even large boulders.  He walked towards one and slowly a residential fence came into focus, and next to it a mature hedge, neatly clipped. The black-top went between these and snaked its way towards the blob which he now concluded was a house—although he did not think it was Alicia’s. Hassan did not have the stomach for another encounter similar to the last one; these homes were too pristine, too self-assured to admit someone like himself in his condition, and he realized that without Alicia by his side, without at least a pair of shoes or a shirt, he could communicate nothing to these people. He continued down the road, and through the trees from time to time he caught glimpses of what must have been the sea, although he could make out very few details; whether there were any blue boat house doors or not he was too far away to say, he could only be sure of the proximity of the sea. But now that he had left it there was no way back to it unless he was to walk through someone’s yard again, and the road itself did not look familiar to him from his drive the previous night. So he continued walking as the sun rose and strengthened and after ten minutes or so he felt the presence of a car approaching behind him.

He turned around just as the police cruiser pulled up alongside him in a stealthy, predatory way. A fuzzy ball of white and blond peered through the cruiser’s window.  There were dark glasses. There was a dark lining of threat below the surface of the voice.

“Hi there. Do you need any help, sir?” More of a challenge than an offer.

Hassan stopped and looked up and down the road. His foot was still bleeding and beginning to hurt badly and his head ached still from the water and the sun.

“Thanks officer. I got a little lost swimming. I think I’m staying down here,” he gestured to the end of the road.

“Do you have any identification, sir?”

Hassan looked at him. “I don’t usually take my wallet swimming with me.”

“Well, how about you ride with me, sir, and we’ll go around the block and see if we can find your friends’ house, then we’ll take it from there?” Hassan groped for the car door and sat himself down on the seat next to an alarming computer set up which was bolted onto the dashboard. Lights blinked and flashed and the radio buzzed and crackled every few seconds.  They rolled along the road past the houses and Hassan peered at them all, his weak eyes hardly able to distinguish anything familiar.  As the rode he described the house to the police officer, and told him about Alicia’s parents, and how he could not remember their names. They turned down several streets which were on the water, and still nothing registered with Hassan.

“Sir, it may be better to go on back to the station and get some more details from you. Maybe we can get a fix on things from there,” said the officer. Hassan understood his meaning clearly enough. He would, no doubt, be asked to give some kind of personal information that identified him as a legal entity in the country, but he had no idea how he could do this without any documents of any kind.

As the cruiser turned around and headed back towards the station a voice came on the police radio. Much of it was incomprehensible to Hassan, including coded numbers for specific police issues. The officer picked up his hand set and had a rapid fire discussion with the dispatcher.

“Well, we may have solved your problem,” he said, grinning at Hassan. “looks like your friends called the police and reported you missing. At least somebody cares about you.” The drive to Alicia’s house took another ten minutes, and was much further than Hassan would have guessed. As the cruiser nosed its way into the driveway between two stately pine trees Hassan made out three figures standing in front of the house. He identified Alicia by her red sweatshirt, the same one she had been wearing when he left her on the oversized chair on the porch. As the cruiser negotiated the circular driveway, Hassan half wished he were back in the estuary, swimming, ensconced in the forgiving liquidity that is water, where even the keenest human eye is reduced to blindness. As he stepped out of the car, Alicia ran up to him and wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug. He was back, and forever hostage to the stubborn reality of the brittle world he was destined to inhabit, perhaps as an azad, or free man, after all, and not a date tree.

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