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PART V
ORAP

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE MARTH OF MUNCH

Faceless, marked only by our height, we are paired up and marched out of the prison. Twelve of us shuffle under the arches. Emerging from months of gloom, I crane my neck to see the tiled mosaic and beautiful intricate corners where the arches meet the wall. My eyes try to adjust to looking at something other than four walls close together. The prison is the most ancient building in Orap. The only building a myriad of successive regimes left standing. The facade is meticulously maintained. It remained when all else was gone. In a fluctuating, unstable society like ours the people in the government thought more about the people in the prisons than the people outside.
I don’t know what time of year it is but the grasping bone chill of winter seems all but gone. The morning sun has an intensity that suggests Orap’s early short spring. I bet it is the month of March.
For all I know it is the Marth of Munch.
I am cuffed to a tiny woman at my side. She has to lift up her arm to be comfortable. Her hands are gloved. Mine are bare and it actually makes me feel self conscious and unprotected. Armed guards prowl along our flanks. Their faces are as blank as ours are non-existent. I could take this opportunity to run, dragging the tiny woman along with me but Orap is not a city to escape into.
Outside the prison is a prison also.
The courtroom is across the street and the steps are already crowded. I feel excitement build as we approach. In so many months I have not seen a written word, an image, or had a conversation. Any break from the crush of routine would have been a thrill but to be outside and the center of attention is exhilarating. We all walk straighter and with purpose. We are one long narrow insect animal. In prison it is hard not to feel forgotten. To know you are been watched is a kind of freedom.
The twelve of us handcuffed in pairs walk up the steps and through the door. Why did the lawyer sketch the stolen faces? Was it to distinguish who was who? I actually put my hand under my veil to touch my nose. I’m suddenly not convinced that they have left me intact. My nose is there. It is not really my nose but a nose Uncle Mo built for me after he plucked off the old crooked Orapian nose. I was horrified when that ancient ethnic nose arrived on my face in early adolescence. I counted the days to when I could have it razed to the ground and have something more modern, more convenient, built instead. Really, I wanted a more silent nose. Life was deliciously shallow then.
Being a doctor didn’t interest me as much as making lots of money and having an easy life. In fact I considered business school or law as quicker routes to eternal stability and respectability, but my mother insisted on medicine, and I always abided by her wishes.
It was not a profession that suited me however, and I was miserable even if I didn’t recognize my misery as an aberration. I was reluctant to effect change, to plunge into people, to twist them around. I needed a profession that didn’t meddle with lives and I couldn’t find one worse. Lawyers may interfere with freedom or finance but doctoring was outrageous. I had to put my hand inside people. I rearranged them. I changed them.
Sick people disgusted me. To follow in the footsteps of my odious Uncle Mo was all I wanted. When I did my residency in a ghetto hospital I had to touch all sorts of ill-fitting people. People who smelled bad, whose feet were bloated and bruised from journeys taken to no good destinations, whose skin was that fucked over black of black ice. Junkies, prostitutes, derelicts. Stupid people who asked stupid questions and didn’t listen to the answers. These people are ruining America, I told my mother when she massaged my back and fed me Orapian stews each evening. If those patients knew how I felt about them, how touching them made me want to throw up. If they knew, I’m sure they would have rather died on the streets. I was racist. Like most Orapians I aligned myself with the white people. The fact that the whites never saw us as such was something we didn’t internalize. I was spoiled. An Orapian American princess. Even though I had been looking at people in pain for years I never knew what it was.
I have time to reminiscence since they sit us down in a bare room and tell us our lawyer will be along soon. Baby Zero, let us conduct our own trail by memory. The crime will not be revealed until the sentence has been passed.
Will my mother be here? Have I put her on trial too? My mother and I used to have screaming battles. I once struck her because she bought the wrong hair dye and my blond hair went so dark I almost looked like I should have. I had beautiful hair and spent hours keeping it that way. From my father’s side of the family. It is still here under my veil. My mother had stringy hair shot through with static. She kept dying it blond until it was like green fuzz. Zolo had the same hair. He let it be until it was almost an Afro. I’m not sure that Zolo ever lowered himself to look in a mirror.
Zolo never cared how others perceived him. He was free. No one ever knew why he formed the peculiar loyalties that he did. Mehrdad, Faz, Jack and Desiree. Zolo did as he pleased at all times. He was the most selfish person I have ever known, but that doesn’t offend me. I always envied his liberty from other people opinions. His drive to pursue whatever amused him at any given moment. He never said a good word about anyone yet he never appeared disappointed. As if he knew all along that humanity wasn’t up to much, but that it was entirely acceptable to him. Like Mo, he had no ideology and no loyalty, but unlike Mo he had a sense of humor. Zolo knew implicitly that we get from one end of life to the other supported by illusions. Illusions of love, status, material goods. That was what I admired Zolo for; he was too brilliant to have sustainable illusions, yet he got through without freaking out. The strength that must have taken was immense.
The prisoners are fidgeting. We have been told not to speak to each other. I wouldn’t know what to say to anybody. My only company has been my memories, putting our family history in some sort of order for you. Telling you the story.
At the beginning of this regime the Iranians condemned the government of Orapistan for their treatment of women. You know you are in trouble when the Iranians think you treat women badly. I never hung out with women, but I used to date Iranians in Los Angeles. Medical students of course. They were good looking and they loved to party. I took my uncle’s advice and tried to pass myself off as an Iranian with an American mother. Too bad I wasn’t one and my mother was Farah.
Is Farah out there? I haven’t spoken to her since her second and last visit to the prison. The taxi driver was still helping her out. She nearly spat when I said we were lucky to have found him. “Not for free. He’s charging me extra for the risk he’s taking. I don’t trust him. He would paint a cucumber and try to sell it to you as a banana.” She said. My mother was my maid when I was growing up. She waited on me hand and foot. She cooked for me, cleaned for me, chauffeured me, and made my bed every day. She encouraged me to spend all my free time shopping and hanging out at the mall with her. As long as I scraped through medical school she thought I could do no wrong. She dyed my hair, put on my make-up and obsessed along with me about the whole string of ridiculous pompous dates that I never allowed touch me. She trained me how to hate.
I notice something suddenly. All the women are pregnant. It’s hard to tell under the voluminous black cloth but as they shift and move I see the bumps silhouetted. I touch my own bump. Eight months now. Are you ready? Come join us all in this great game, truth will be checked in at the door and illusions provided for no extra charge.
My zero. My river inside.
I cup my hands around you.
Heart like a mink in a trap.
The Arabs were the first to tell us that zero is nothing but it’s where it all starts.
When I think of the future I think of doors shutting all over the world.
What can I give you?

In my lifespan I saw it all go up in smoke. The last wild elephants disappeared, the tigers, the koalas, the bears are gone. We have specimens in zoos – but a tiger in the zoo is not a tiger. The coral reefs are all but gone. 50% of the world’s species disappeared in my lifetime. There were death announcements on TV. The last Gorilla, the last Giraffe, most of the insects, all the frogs. All marched into the great mountain of memory. The whale, of course. We’d been waiting for that for a long time. We stopped the count down. Ishmael had preached to the assembled peasants in the camp that we were in the middle of the sixth great extinction. They had shrugged and thought about their families and food.
It was people like my uncle Mo with an insatiable appetite for flamingo tongues. Who liked to sprinkle ground down rhinoceros horn in his shark fin soup. He ushered in depletion.
The mouse, the cow, the pig, the sheep, the chicken they are all here with us. Anything we could eat and tame we kept. But anything that caught our eye is gone. The zebra, the eagle, the bear, the orangutan. And we loved them, and wanted to save them, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. The bear surprisingly went for his bladder – the Chinese wanted the bile. The orangutan, man of the forest, disappeared through loss of habitat as expected.
Can we conceive of our loss?
Nobody really liked the people who wanted to save the world. They were not an appealing cast of characters. They irked me with their single-mindedness, their chasing of causes. At times, I suspected, it was akin to fanaticism. That kind of devotion and dedication dried out their lives. But when they lost I personally resented them for not trying harder.
Enter into this depletion. Feel what it is to be suddenly alive at the tail end of the sixth great extinction. Come in through me. I will contaminate you with my love, just as Farah loved me. I will nurture you to leave me. And from your prison crib you will see me smile, as all mothers do, all the love in the world will be swirling in my bottomless smile.
And my smile will be a dark hole in my face.
I know baby zero you sleep inside me now as I await my trail. I am feeding you your dreams. I am being set up. We are both helpless and at the mercy of those who have shown no mercy to this date. I keep the story going in my head.
We sit and wait. Once I would have despised my fellow inmates but now I long to touch one of the other women. I long to catch their eyes and read how scared they are. But I can’t see their eyes. The unfriendly mesh reveals nothing. This covering does not diminish us according to plan. It mythologies us. Our story is larger. We are more photogenic, more iconic. I could see the press clamor to capture our image as one snake of draped femininity. Mystery is power; we will never be ordinary like this. The slave is not ordinary in chains and the cow is not ordinary stripped of its skin and hanging. A man enters and orders us to stand and walk in single file to the courtroom. Our trial is to begin.
The ghosts of the past are hungry. I sleep so little these nights, either the baby moves too much and lies on my bladder or the hungry ghosts gnaw through my sleep until my dreams are shredded. Days only punctuated by a guard taking my bucket and leaving food.
Everything comes through me though I am nothing. I should know. I was baby zero too.
I look at my feet, they are black, cracked, raw and swollen. The kind of feet I noted on indigent people who came into the hospital looking for my help. It was their feet that horrified me the most. I wondered how they had ever let themselves deteriorate to such a level. Parts of my feet have yellow discs of hard flesh. The skin is solidified. I stroke the sole of my foot, it is as coarse and padded as a paw.
What should I say to exonerate myself? I am an American. I merely took those women from the hospital and dumped them on the steps of the parliament building to get more medical attention for them, not to question the regime. I was doing it for the good of the women. God guided me every step of the way. If I could talk to my lawyer I could tell him this is my defense. I was acting selflessly in the interest of others, as a woman should.
The truth is I loathed people. The steady stream of complaining masses that came under my care probably didn’t notice this. Some did, there was a black man who looked at me in the eye and said. “I am not a beast.” I looked right through him and agreed. “Alas! There are very few of those left.” I said. But I didn’t care about the animals disappearing or the fish in the underworld losing their coral beds, or the land sinking and the sea rising. I wanted to get that infernal residency over and done with and go join my uncle in his plastic surgery practice. People who hate their outsides were preferable to people whose insides have gone wrong. If I very deliberately and intuitively existed on the outside then it was purely outsides that I wanted to deal with. I worked hard, both at the residency and under Mo’s tutelage. Together we fattened up lips and vaginas, augmented breasts, clipped noses, pulled faces tight, smoothed out eyes, lifted lids, sucked fat. He was delighted with my apprenticeship and my impoverished parents were sure he would leave it all in my hands.
We depended on him for so much. I lived with my parents all through college in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Westwood, Los Angeles. We three slept in the bedroom in the same bed. I accepted this arrangement and never expected to live in dorms or with other students. She said it was to protect my honor but she didn’t want to be alone with my deflated father. Zolo never called or came around.
My mother shaped me – she trained me to think like a hunter, to get everything. To push people around. To value money more than friendship. To be reptilian cold and murderously ambitious. To take and never be grateful. To find fault. We were very close, she and I.
Dressed in new identical burquas, we are marched into the courtroom to stand under scrutiny. There is nothing to adorn the walls of the courtroom but cracks in the green paint. There are less faded patches where portraits used to hang. Spray painted on the wall are the words, “Orapistan, one nation under God.” And behind the judge’s chair the words “Infinite Justice” are scrawled so crudely that paint has run on some swirling letters. My mother might be able to identify me as the tallest in the group. I incline my head slightly at the audience. Men and women sit on separate sides. Do I imagine I see one of the women nod in my direction. Is that my mother? I have not felt the baby move in hours.
You will be still. You will be silent. You will be naked.
Baby Zero. How can you sleep now? We are on trial. Am I telling you too much? Revealing so many ugly things in my nature that you won’t imagine me as your mother. Have I lost your sympathy? I’m only going by what Mehrdad kept telling me. And Mehrdad was the only truly good person I have ever met in my life. He kept telling me, the less we know of history the more it controls us.
A young soldier comes out and barks.
“All Rise.”
The entire assembly stands. I am comforted by the fact that we all seem to be serious about the game we are playing here; we are sticking to imported rituals of the court. But when the judge enters hope is eclipsed eerily from my heart like the sun from the noonday sky. The judge is fifteen years old. The same age as Zolo and Mehrdad were. I am to be judged by a child.
We women who stand accused shiver together like one lonely trapped animal. We are thinking one thought. Children are fundamentalists and they have no mercy. Grimly, twelve of us, without a word having to be said, are marched into the featureless mountain of our fate.
For a second I hope to see Mehrdad in the court, on a white horse, ready to scoop me up under his arm and gallop off, but I know none of the men. Their faces strain to see who we are and which one is which, faces written over with fear and hope. Again I look to the women and search for some indication that my mother is present. It is impossible to distinguish her from the crowd of veiled women.
My mother changed her story so many times. There was no dwelling on what had gone, rather she put forward the notion of a fully interchangeable set of stepping-stones to the deserved present. She fired lies into the past like heat seeking bullets, hoping to kill the shadows before they broke loose and floated into the present world like dark unmoored ghosts.
“America owes us this.” Maman and Baba both managed to finagle social security payments despite never working a day here in their lives.
“What does it owe us? Why?”
“We got here and we have no money.”
“So why does it owe us?”
“We earned what we get from the government.”
“You took it.”
“We earned the right to take it.”
“What do we have?”
We had a rented apartment in Westwood with a communal pool and a hot tub and a gym. But this was L.A. everyone had that. We had one bedroom. We had a spice rack, a dishwasher, a pedal garbage can so our fingers wouldn’t get dirty. We had central air. We had cable. I watched the Style channel, MTV, and the Entertainment channel. But if I was studying nobody was allowed to move. My mother and father sat like statues. They neither spoke nor read. They sat in separate parts of the small living room with their hands on their laps and I never even knew nor cared what they thought of in those hours of silence. In fact I assumed they were empty. After all, they could have gone out but what was outside for them? Were they guarding me? Was I their jailer or was the notion of my life their jailer? I had to be the proof, to show that the past had a point. Our daughter the medical student. Even when there was no one to boast to.
We had no friends. Zolo loathed us. Uncle Mo barely tolerated us.
When Mehrdad showed up unannounced at our door in that generic apartment in Los Angeles my father came alive as never before. He ushered him in and made him sit on the beige couch, with his feet on the machine made rug, and put a cup of tea on the glass table under the green plastic plant.
I was in the bedroom and I heard him say.
“I was in Los Angeles for a conference so I thought I’d look you up.”
“After all these years, young Mehrdad, my God, Farah can you believe it?” My father gushed.
“Yes, it’s good to see you Dr. Fatagagas.” He smiled at my father, almost warmly. Then nodded more hesitantly at my mother. “Madame Fatagagas.”
“You’ll want Zolo’s number. He’s up in silicon valley making money but he’d love to talk to you.” My father was blushing and giddy but my mother loomed like an empty skyscraper.
“Actually, I really wanted to talk to Leila.”
I walked out to face him. He stood. His face at that moment was transformed. I thought I saw tears in his eyes. I think his hands shook and some tea spilt on that machine made rug.
“Leila.” He said.
I glanced at my parents, they were as frozen and tiny as the figures in the paintings. Mehrdad gathered himself inwardly and smiled, somewhat embarrassed. Intrigued, I was observing all of this. While taking note of the tears and the shake I also took note of his brown corduroy trousers and check shirt. I didn’t like the way he dressed. But he was tall, dark and handsome like the princes in the story books. Too bad he seemed kind of geeky.
“You’ve grown up, Leila. But you’re still just as I remember you. You’re beautiful.”

The prosecutor is an old man of thirty with a soft voice. He wears the garb of all the men, black turban, long flowing robes and a harsh long tough looking beard. He is a man who by all appearances never danced once in his life, never allowed pictures or music in his house, never laughed at a wedding. A man dulled by fanaticism always wiping with the left hand, praying on a schedule, a man who had been controlled and is controlling. Everyone leans forward in a wave to hear our crimes. I don’t know why we women seem to be grouped together. Surely my crime of organizing the patients in the hospital for a public protest is radically different from anything these poor creatures could have come up with.
The Boy Judge: Where is their defense lawyer?
Defense: Here your honor.
Judge: Are you calling any witnesses?
Defense: There are no witnesses your honor. In one case there was another woman present.
Prosecutor: Your honor, one-woman witness is only half a man. We need two women to make a whole witness.
Judge: Defense, I am not interested in the individual cases. These women will be judged as a whole. Despite the media presence this is not an important case. We have many other matters to decide today. There is a meteorite shower due to rain down on us in the hour after dusk and I’m sure we all want to see such a sign from God. I do anyway.” The judge smiled slightly showing his youth. He was wearing those wooden sandals with the heal. His eyes were painted with Kohl as is the fashion here. He struck me as quite effeminate.
Defense: Yes your honor. Then I will have to concede that there are no witnesses.
Judge: Prosecutor, what is the charge?
Prosecutor: The charge is Zima, your honor. Sexual intercourse out of wedlock.
Judge: None of these women are married?
Defense: Your honor these women did not consent to sexual intercourse, they were raped by prison guards. All have got pregnant since been imprisoned.
Judge: So they were criminals to start with.
Defense: They had been arrested your honor not charged.
Judge: You have no witnesses. Prosecutor, do you have witnesses?
Prosecutor: We have, your honor. We have the prison guards. Officials of the realm. They will tell you that these women begged for sex in prison.
Defense: Your honor, the guards are the ones who raped these women.
Judge: Are the guards on trail?
Defense: Not at this time, your honor.
Judge: Then we do not tolerate such accusations. Strike that from the record.
(Everyone looks around but it seems no one is taking a record. Flies buzz around the eyes of the judge. He is hot and irritated. He looks to the rectangle of sky through the glassless window, anxious for his meteorite shower.)
I am confused. I have no idea why they talk of this. I thought I was on trial for what I was arrested for. That would make too much sense for these demented, ferocious children.
This trial seems to have nothing to do with me. People are shifting in their seats and there is a lot of coughing and throat clearing. The judge is talking to the prosecutor and defender at the bench. They motion for us to come forward. We 12 women all stand in a row before the judge with our backs to everyone else.
“Show your faces!” Our lawyer barks.
There is a gasp from the court. The judge bangs his gavel.
“Silence or I’ll have the court cleared and you all flogged.”
We slowly pull up the burqua and let him glimpse our faces. He scans all of them. I look at the midget beside me and realize she is a little girl.
“What age is this one?” The judge says, pointing to her.
“Twelve.” The lawyer says.
“And she’s already pregnant?” The judge is staring harshly at her.
“Your honor, you can see her brothers have already punished her. Most have been punished already by family. We see no need for further punishment.”
The face of the child has been corroded in places with acid. Her nose is burnt flat and her eyes look stuck open.
The judge stares at me with piercing eyes that convey loathing. “This is the American?”
“Yes. I’m American. There has been a mistake…” I start to say.
“Silence.” The judge, prosecutor and my lawyer shout all at once.
“I have seen enough.” The judge waves us away in disgust. We are herded back behind a table.
“I have no choice.” The fifteen-year-old judge says. His moustache is soft and fine and his eyes are so young. He has tiny hands and dirty nails. “Firstly, these women are criminals because they are in jail and therefore not good women. None of these women are married and all are pregnant. Therefore, logically, they are guilty of Zina. That is sexual relations outside marriage. It’s irrefutable. The rape defense cannot be verified because there are no male witnesses. The guards will be reprimanded for giving in to the women’s sexual demands. All of the women will be stoned to death as an example to Orapian women. Court dismissed.”
There were screams from the people in the court. A man shouted.
“But your honor we have punished our sister. We have punished her because you asked us to. We were given the acid to pour on her faces and we did it because you said you would let her free.” Everyone is pushing around him. Guards shove back at him. Hitting him with their rifle buts. There is so much pushing and shoving as we are pulled back into the corridor. I look for my mother but I honestly don’t think she is here. The families are yelling at the prosecutor and the judge has come back on the stand.
“For your information they will not be executed until they have their children. We will inform you about the fate of the children.”
It is night as we leave the court and chained together we are marched across the street. The ancient texts described this as a beautiful city close to the Silk Road, although scholars who never believed it could be here dispute that. There are paintings somewhere of its mythical gardens and fountains and golden minarets capturing the sun. That city is long gone, gone even before our tribes swept through, gone a thousand years or more. That past is too far away to warm me as I trudge, heavy bellied out of the court, chained to the tiny woman who is a girl child without a face. We are spooks draped and veiled, furtively stealing glances through the mesh in front of our eyes. A corpse that was hanging from the lamppost has now been stripped of his shoes and clothes by scavengers.
Then stars begin to break down all over us. Everyone stalls and looks up to the collapsing sky.
Baby Zero, the female face is an open grave, a deadly trap. We must spare you our faces in the crowd; keep you from seeing the empty animal of our face. Bad dreams to wake to, my little baby. Hush now. No use crying inside of me. I can’t hear your soundless pleas. I can’t comfort you. Our legacy of impotence and bovine madness will not open a door for you. Lost in our own nature. Tricked by our biologies. We only know our own stories and we worship these stories without listening to them. We are ruined and captured. We are animals being returned to the zoo.
And I saw, as I looked up, a shower of meteorites in the sky, dust from a comet that passed us by 200 years ago, and I ached as they swooned, raced, fizzled triumphant in colored streaks before disappearing forever. The present hurts so much. I long for the past, the places in history, the times when it was all a little younger, our fate was not so sealed, depletion was not an alter, and there was less evidence of the long sacrifice. I ached for a time (was there really such a time?) when things bigger than us walked the earth. We lost them baby zero; I have nothing to show you but my own face. Little you will gain from that.
The past is coming through and momentarily lighting our walk under the arches and back through prison gates. They herd us on, and we walk in a huddle straining to look upwards. The sky filled with dust from 200 years ago, settling on this scene of small-made sorrow.