Exiles in America(151)

Daniel lay in the dark, studying the silhouette of Zack’s nose and beard,

feeling the heat of his legs, listening to his breathing merge with the breathing

of their animals. He was surprised at how calm he felt, worried but not pan-

icked, sad but not devastated, nowhere near as upset as Zack had been.

Which was odd, since Daniel was the one whose lover had run off. His ex-

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C h r i s t o p h e r B r a m

lover anyway. A piece of him was actually glad that Abbas was gone and their

story was over. There was no way it could resume. It really was over.

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Early the next morning, while they drank their coffee, the phone rang. It was

Justine Whitehurst, the FBI agent. “We’re trying to reach Mr. and Mrs. Ro-

hani. Can you help us?”

Daniel promptly passed the receiver to Zack.

Zack played dumb with the woman, pretending to know nothing. Then he

said, “Frankfurt? ” He lifted his eyebrows at Daniel. “Well, if you knew they

flew from Toronto to Frankfurt, why are you asking us questions?” The voice

buzzed again in his ear. “Are you serious? You make their lives miserable, you

threaten to take the man’s children away, and you ask me if I have any idea

why they left the country? You people have no sense of human reality.”

He hung up and told Daniel, “They’re in Frankfurt. Where there’s a six-

hour layover before the next flight to Tehran. So they’re going where they said

they were going. And they’re safe. At least at this end. The FBI can’t arrest

them.”

Later they heard from Jeremy, who was not surprised by the news. “This is

why I avoid immigration cases. More often than not, your client skips the

country before you ever go to court.”

They heard nothing from Hassan.

Friday passed, then Saturday. One can grow accustomed to almost any-

thing, even a loss like death that isn’t death. People leave town all the time,

but this was different, stranger, final yet not final enough, as if there were

ghosts who might return.

Telling friends helped, only there were few friends to tell. Zack phoned

Ross at home and gave him the full story. “Crazy lady,” said Ross. “I don’t

know what she sees in that man. He’s hardly worth a trip back to the land of

the garden of martyrs.”

Daniel told Jane at school on Monday morning. “He’s gone? Just like that?

You’re sure? You poor guy.” Her sympathy surprised him. Then she said,

“Oh shit. What am I gonna tell the dean?” She stopped worrying about

E x i l e s i n A m e r i c a

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Daniel and worried about what to do with Abbas’s class for the rest of the se-

mester. Daniel volunteered to teach it.

The next day the department secretary came to Daniel with the keys to

Abbas’s studio. “We hear there’s lots of artwork and art supplies in there.

Could you look things over and see what can be kept or thrown out?”

Daniel had forgotten about Abbas’s paintings.

He went to the studio that afternoon, fearing what he might find there.

Slashed canvases? Trash cans stuffed with masterpieces? He nervously un-

locked the door and opened it on a darkness full of the smell of oil paints, like

beef stew gone bad. He flipped the switch; the lights fluttered on. The place

was a wreck, but a familiar wreck, a friendly chaos. Daniel saw the old table

heaped with dirty brushes and crushed paint tubes. Then he saw the green

leather sofa, their old fuck sofa—he had forgotten it was green, Mohammed’s

favorite color. Behind the sofa stood a crowd of empty stretchers, a forest of

squares and rectangles with the canvas stripped off. Daniel had been here for

the stripping. Against the right-hand wall, however, stood frames with fabric

still attached, their painted sides facing the wall, their marked-up backs facing

out. Daniel tilted one away from the wall. The paint had not been scraped off

or painted over but was perfectly pristine. This was the older work, the work

Daniel liked best. The newer paintings were gone, shipped to Iran. But Abbas

cared so little for the older work that he didn’t destroy or cancel it, he simply

left it behind, like so many shed skins.

Daniel was enormously relieved. Then he wondered how the pictures

might look now, what they might mean to him.

He set the canvases out on the floor, a half dozen big, square carpets of

color, giant playing cards, the oversize panels of a neo-Expressionist comic

strip. Here was the orange gingerbread man tattooed with little bodies. Here

was the family of ideograms on a beach fighting a giant fish—the fish resem-

bled male genitals. How had he not seen that before? Here was a burnt sienna

landscape full of sublimated body parts, a reddish brown desert decorated in