Maryam and I bought some dark chocolate and a beautiful little glass with black roses on it and a serpent that had crawled down the edges to the bottom and then when we were drinking its mouth had like… devoured the glass’ lips, Mary noticed. Nina said Alireza was one shot ahead of us. He looked at me, winked, raised four fingers and smiled: the most light-hearted man I had ever been friends with. Nina sometimes gazed at us but always ended the gaze with one sentence:" Boy, am drunk"
I feel uncomfortable and ask her to play her music selection. I know she's half-deaf, like me and I'm the only one who knows. She, hardly trying to keep her balance, asks for our favorite music. And we all shout summer wine. She disappears in the room where she exercises. After a long time, she comes back bringing the voice of Nancy Sinatra with herself with eyes red, she says: why don't we ever dance? Maybe because we don't know how to, I say. She reaches for my hand, I'll teach you, she says and pushes me to herself. I can't say I'm surprised but what's the way out? She whispers something in my ear. I'm waiting, I say and look at Alireza and Mary. She puts her head on my shoulder and falls asleep. I take her to her bed (she's not heavy) but the moment I want to put her head on the pillow she opens her eyes and kisses me on the lips. For a moment I don't know what to do but then I say sweet nightmares and leave the room.
Going back I go to the other room and play my own selection which starts with Bob Dylan's Ain't Talkim and ends with Shajariyan's Bidad. In the dark, I sit at the computer desk and listen to them who're talking about me but I don't understand well what they're saying. I can only recognize the phrase on the edge. Then I go to the living room, sit beside Mary and kiss her on the neck. They are talking about the death of music. Iranian music is dead, rock died with Pink Floyd, Jazz is no more a sort of resistance, folk music cannot exist, it's all cheap pop music and some single tracks. Done! Everything is reduced to nothing.
But I still like Iranian traditional, I say. Probably because you play it, but could you compare it, all of it, to one piece of Bach? Alireza says. These are two totally different discourses, Mary says, how can one not love Shajariyan? Oh, come on, whenever I hear his voice I feel like crying. I sit on the floor, and look at shining curly hair of my love cascading down on her fair neck. How about Neynava? I say, have you ever tried to listen to it as an independent piece not slain by TV on Ashura days? No, he says, because I hate the whole thing. Alireza, Mary says, it's got nothing to do with Karbala, Nineveh or other bullshit, they have made it their own, they have devoured all others have created.
It's about four in the morning, and I think I'm too young to solve the world's problems but I can't take my eyes off human, this nasty creature. I don't understand well what leftist theorists say, nor do I feel sympathetic with the rightist theorists. What I'm sure about is that our childhood was a decade of horror, when I saw how a man broke when they broke his violin. I was five. In the back seat, I was sitting between my mother and my older sister. They stopped us and shouted at us to get out of my father's car. And when they found the violin, as if they had found a bomb, started shouting even louder at my father's friend: What's this? What the heck is this? Ha? I remember well how they hit it to the car's door. I remember well the sound of cords which sounded like slaps on the face, I remember well the violin's wood debris, yes and I remember well the shivering of the violinist's head of terror and his incredulous eyes. That night before we took the violinist home, at a garden which belonged to a family friend, he had played some old songs and my father had sung.
I however never could figure out the logic behind what some of our teacher's did. Like I don't know why I was punished for putting on Argentina's National Football team and a wristlet like that of Maradona in the fourth grade, or why my friends stole my miniature notebook and gave it to our headmaster who tore it apart. The note book was my miniature drawings of Hafez, Sa'di and Molavi's books which I had drawn in the afternoons when everybody was asleep. Or I still can't swallow why my teacher didn't believe I had drawn Farabi's face myself and called me a liar, and even when I drew it again in class, she didn't look at it and said that time was up. So what did the Doggone Soul do that they caught him. I couldn't find him anywhere in university after class. I may not have checked well enough. But no, I looked for him everywhere. What he does is intoxicating himself by a joint and reading out loud his favorite poems. Why and how could someone hurt others this way? Or this is not really the fact, the truth, the reason, the mind behind it. So what? I ask.
They turn their heads and look at me. What is it hon? Mary asks with her agitated running pupils. Nothing, I say, just thinking out loud…what are you talking about? About how somebody can live two lives at one single moment, Ali says. What? I ask. Mary kisses me on the neck, and says: like how you can listen to all this hodge-podge of music, rock, country, traditional, etc. and still enjoy all. No, Ali says, I've got a better example. Like how is it that you're here and still live the past and imagine the future. In a few minutes you changed into philosophers? I say. Mary smiles, honey your selection was the reason. Oh, come on, just enjoy the shit, whatever it is. That's blindness, Ali says with sincerity. Oh guys Ok now, Mary squeezes my hand, let's have our last shot.
After our last shot we are all silent like all other creatures in the room and the kitchen, like the fridge which was not shivering anymore, like the three dark roses on the glass table, like the TV, the fire in the small fireplace, the curtain and the window behind it, like the snow which is not falling and I damn wish it fell, and like the furniture which were cracking joints, like silence. And that is how we continue drinking, falling into the boredom of parties' ends, lying here and there, rolling quietly as if we don't want to awake the weight, the thing and we are high and all we think is the nada behind words. The nada that exists behind all the nada. But I fall apart and think of writing, still no words, no reason, still a why-should-I?
