the ringleader.
I also mobilized the spitting of orange-peel pellets onto the blackboard. The tip of Bic pens that had been hollowed of their ink cartridges were punched into orange peel, pellets were lodged in and fired at the blackboard with a swift blow into the other end of the casing when the teacher was chalking the board.
On summer afternoons that stretched for eons, I retreated into Hemingway and Farrokhzad and de Chateaubriand and Gertrude Stein and Behrangi and Dickens and Emma Goldman and Al-Ahmad and Neruda and Fuentes and García Márquez and Daneshvar and Twain in my cool bedroom sanctuary. My father would, upon leaving home for the clinic in the morning, hand me a book—not picture books, we are talking Kafka—and tell me we were discussing it in the evening when he returned. And such went my literary education, and all the personas that I got to take on when immersed in those other worlds, intimate with so many characters and their dramas.
Nothing was missed from the absence of religious faith in my home. We had literature. My parents found spiritual solace in art. I would come to understand that the making of art promised that all my travails would be in the service of something better, building toward a redemption, giving my life an arc bent toward meaning.
During all the years I lived in Iran both before and after the revolution, I exchanged heaps of hand-written letters in English with pen pals all over the world. There were readily available forms I cannot remember how or through whom to be filled out and sent away that resulted magically in pen pal matches. I wonder whether children still practice this mysterious exchange, or whether internet connectivity hijacked this pleasure. Letters would arrive from faraway places in exotic or thin blue Par Avion envelopes bearing unfamiliar stamps and ink charting journeys through ports. I carefully lifted the stamps to add to my heavy stamp-collector’s book that was filled with picturesque stamps from my father’s correspondences from abroad and others he bought my brother and me at stamp stores, another favorite childhood token lost in emigration. I don’t have copies of the letters I wrote, nor any trace of where, to whom, and how many were sent. So many lost Creation Stories. Perhaps somewhere in my musty storage bags filled with letters received from my Iranian schoolmates after I left might be lodged an odd copy.
Packets of Pop Rocks arrived from America. The most memorable flavor: purple grape. I had never put anything like them in my mouth. Purely chemical tiny rocks unexpectedly thudding into the upper palate of my mouth. Almost violent.
What is time?
— A way of keeping track of how things evolve. The order of one thing coming after another.
— Causality. What causes what.
— A human construct, time may or may not exist.
— Everything may have already happened, and we are just aware of little pieces at a time.
— A way to ensure everything does not happen at once.
— Space is a way to ensure that not everything happens to us.
— A standard argument for time running forward:
We remember the past and not the future.
And what if we were going backwards in time?
We would progressively forget the past, undoing memories we have formed.
— We can time-travel into the past and the future:
We remember the first kiss and imagine next month’s vacation.
— People with dementia cannot imagine themselves fully or make new memories or predict the future. Our memories are crucial to our identities.
— Time feels longer if we are present. Time flies if we are busy.
I felt this during my car accident when all my attention went to that one thing, the swerving of my car across many lanes of the 405 freeway traffic toward the median at high speed while singing at the top of my lungs to Yma Sumac playing loudly on the stereo. My whole life did not flash before my eyes, but I did make a curious decision, or rather, the decision presented itself to me: I was moving to San Francisco—which I did on a Monday in December 1994, the day my physical therapy for broken bones ended. I had $60 in my pocket and no job, only a carry-on with a portable laptop and printer. When I was put onto a stretcher at the scene of the accident, I directed the paramedics to retrieve the master copy of a documentary I had made and was delivering to its producer from the glove box of the totaled car. I think of the accident as a not-so-gentle nudge to stop moping directionless at my parents’ home after college and to get my life going already.
Our experience of time distorted, we are visited by moments, tableaus. We attribute different degrees of importance to them by storing and dramatizing certain episodes, rendering them integral to our essence and being. Our sense of self is a game of Russian roulette.
While reaching back in time, I searched the internet for old images of my schools. Every time, I type the name of the school of my hearts, Ettefagh.
My mother was so exacting about my education that she would enroll me at the beginning of each school year in a name school that promised the moon: the American school, the French school among them. She would interrogate me every day after school to get to the bottom of how the day was structured, gauge if I had learned enough, and how much homework I had. Sure enough, no school ever passed muster, and two weeks into the school year, and a whole new school uniform to buy, I would return to Ettefagh, a public school with a reputation for high academic standards. In addition to being closed on Fridays, the Sabbath in Iran, Ettefagh school was also closed on Saturdays, following Jewish Sabbath, which was normally the first day of the week in Iran. I grew up with an unusual two-day weekend. To make up for the lost time, our school days were long, 8 a.m.–4 p.m. with a full load of academic classes. My arms were weighed down by a heavy leather bag of textbooks and notebooks, including ones with black nylon covers with a hologram design. I loved the time at the end of summer when we shopped for new school supplies. I loved choosing which notebook for which subject, writing my name in them with my favorite four-color pens in my well-practiced and eye-pleasing handwriting, keeping everything neat. At home I settled at my desk for several hours of homework each night. The endurance.
People just like me had posted their old photographs. Others had found vintage video clips, captioning them with nostalgic notes: Does anyone remember this? Our beloved school!
I looked hard into those black-and-white or faded images and shaky sepia clips for something. Anything—the window of my first grade class where I learned the letters A, B, and D in the first phrase we learn at school, Baba ahb dahd. Father water gave. The wide windows of the lunch hall where I would take my little first-grader brother’s hand after anxiously looking for him among the hundreds of uniformed, unleashed children running erratically like atoms under heat in the school yard, where we would haul our large, insulated, black lunch thermoses lovingly stacked with our mother’s homemade foods to eat together. My brother would not remember later that I cared for him like a worried mother.
I need pieces of the past to help me move forward. I pore over old photographs, images that enthrall me endlessly. I depend on them to live. They are frozen yet never stilted to my eyes. Private gazes into scenes summon shadows of memories, memories that are reverse engineered, manufactured from the photographs and mistaken, stored, and embedded as real memories. Each time I look at or think of them they animate whole fictions, myths that are more ancient and modern versions than the myths they conjure. While many fragments recede, some fragments magnify to become primitive symbols of my fears and drives. I redescribe their implications through my own experience. These myths are personal and sacred not because they are flights into an imagined antiquity, or remembrances of beauty, but because they express to me something real in myself, something ungraspable to me through other means, what fulfills a dim longing to belong to a greater sense.1
In these images, I looked for scale. Was that really the entrance that I went through every day? Where was the grand hallway through which my glamorous mother would strut like a movie star in her long fur coat to fetch me? Was it in reality a dingy corridor? Was she really wearing fur? Was what I imagined