How could she withstand that pain? Even a single day of loneliness was bewildering to me. Yet, she did it for five years, alone in a bedroom with a long-dead maid’s son she helped raise – who now stole from her while also taking care of her – and a daughter she confused with a nemesis, and a grandson who barely talked but noticeably loved her with all his life.

You could just see it in Mehran’s eyes when we visited Mami. Silent as he was, sitting on her cigarette-stained couch and watching television, the aura that he emitted around her wasn’t boredom, but sincere love.

Mehran’s silence in the car with me was evoking nothing like that aura.

“Put on some music,” I said to him, just hoping to hear his voice.

“What?”

“This is all so glum,” I remarked, instantly regretting what I said – I shouldn’t have mentioned the gloom at all; maybe I was the only one who felt it; maybe he was fine.

He plugged his phone into the car stereo. Not long after, to my own relief, I heard the mumbles of an acoustic guitar; a Beatles song, or was it just John? – the same man whose music would boom over Mami and baba’s violent fights when I was younger, who’d mute the discord with his own tender cacophony.

This song, slow and grainy, was familiar, but I wasn’t certain whether I had actually heard it or whether Lennon’s nasally voice had just been so wedded to my memories that it made anything seem familiar.

I kept my eyes to the road and breathed a sigh of relief. It was nice for there to be some noise, whatever kind of noise it was. Anything was preferable to the silence of a dead road.

Then I heard the words: my mummy’s dead…

Just then, something inside me ceased trying to recall whether or not I had heard the song before. Instead, I felt humiliated. A familiar voice was mocking me, coolly murmuring reminders of my dead mother into my ear: I can’t get through my head though it’s been so many years my mummy’s dead I can’t explain so much pain my mummy’s dead…

It kept going and going and going, repeating the refrain, the mumbled words warping, darkening, and breaking my heart.

A wave of panic washed over me, and I swerved to the side of the road and stopped the car. How I managed to control myself and not pluck the phone out of the window when I pulled it from the stereo in the midst of my frenzy, I still don’t know.

“What is wrong with you?” I burst at Mehran.

He just turned to me and stared a hushed and vengeful stare. His mouth was a stoic little thing, his lips finely twisted, his eyes vacant. He took the phone, plugged the music into his ears, turned back to the window, and left me alone again.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to press my head against the wheel and weep into it for as long as I could muster tears, but I couldn’t do this in front of Mehran; I couldn’t give him more reason to resent me, to think me weak. Instead, I turned the key and pressed the pedal with my feet, and we soundlessly drove on.

The quivering whimper wedged inside my throat dulled as we continued down the sun-drenched road. The sad, tender memory of my dream last night, with Mami, suddenly alive, sitting on her gravestone and munching down on her favorite noon khame’i from her favorite bakery, overawed my short-lived anger. I turned to Mehran again, and I wanted to place my hands on his, but mistrusting the move midway, I rested my palm on the box of noon khāme’i we’d bought for her instead, resting safely on Mehran’s lap.

With one hand on the wheel and the other on my only living reminder of Mami, I gradually recovered my temperament, diverting my thoughts to the plan I’d devised for Mami after waking from the dream. It was a sentimental plan, perhaps, but I was determined to carry it out. I wanted to line up the pastries on Mami’s gravestone. There was an underlying hope, I think, that when we said goodbye again and left her side, her spirit would rise up to gobble them up one by one.

And yet, by the time I had bought the pastries and set them on Mehran’s lap, reality had already managed to gnaw away at most of the fantasy. It had forced me to recognize that by leaving them on a grave overnight, I’d be inviting even more pests and rodents to Mami’s home. That same nauseous thought cautioned me that the pests already chomping at her body had been waved over by nature’s hand, not mine – and I shouldn’t want to add to her lifeless suffering.

Then again, I might have done it if it weren’t for my dread of Mehran judging me, glaring at me like I had lost my mind. To have to watch his mother line up pastries on a grave was far and away from the normalcy he expected from a mother. Yet, nothing was normal anymore. Everything was spiraling; even the road twisted and turned like the thoughts inside my head.

When I noticed that there was no other car on the road but ours, thoughts of Mami and pastries and John Lennon began to fade and I felt utterly alone again.

I was alone, and Mehran seemed not to care at all. He wanted me alone, I thought self-piteously. He wanted me to suffer. What did we ever do to you, Mehran? When did we wrong you for you to treat us with such apathy at a time like this? I kept thinking, my teeth clenched, my tears holed up but brimming. He had changed so much, I thought as I studied his face from my mirror. His beard was growing and he had no care that it was distorting his innocent image before my eyes. Also new to me were the big bags under his once-peppery eyes. And the wrinkles on his forehead made no sense at all. He was only twenty, for god’s sake. Is this what happened? Did they just… change? Did we raise them just so they could leave one day, so easily, so thoughtlessly, so indignantly?

I had created him. He was mine, but he was now turning into his own person, and into someone I never expected him to be. I wanted to stop the car to hold him and to tell him all that was on my mind, so he could at least know what went on in his mother’s head – how much she cared and cares, and how much she worries, and frets the day that she’ll grow old like Mami, but with nobody to take care of her. Will you leave me alone when I’m dying? I wanted to ask him, like your own uncle left Mami at the first sight of love, or will you come to me every morning? Will you always be my son? But I couldn’t reveal any of these fears. He’d only think me weak and fickle. He already did, as he had for some few years, all because of that one slip. One mistake, for which he hasn’t since forgiven me. This boy still did not understand that even adults could slip, that even mothers could be unmotherly sometimes. Even then, when I had slipped, I hadn’t once forgotten him. But he refused to believe it, to believe me, never giving me the chance to bring forward the topic to reassure him.

Mami had strayed so many times throughout our lives, with no apology given, and no reassurances. Yet, despite it all, I still managed to forgive her without actually having to forgive. When had I done this forgiving though? Was it when I saw her love for Mehran for the first time, as she sat cradling the newborn infant in her arms, a smile manifesting like I’d never seen before? Or was it later – the first time I found her collapsed on her bathroom tiles, whimpering and panting but promptly quieting down when she’d felt me approach her, only to then turn to me and cast that first-of-many confused and juvenile looks upward in my direction, holding out in her trembling palms the broken cigarette that she’d tried to sneak past me before falling down?

“It’s… your right,” Mehran murmured to me suddenly.

“What is my right?” I quavered, shocked by both his voice and the candid declaration that seemed to have passed me by.

“You should have taken that right.”

“No, it’s here,” I quickly gathered myself.

I pointed my finger to the row of mausoleums to our left.

“It’s not. You missed it.”

Flushed with emotion, I had glazed over the brick walls welcoming us to the city of the dead, a city deprived of time, where the only memories were those the grieving made with stone. Then again, I wasn’t visiting this place to create new memories with my mother. I visited this place, this artificial paradise, because I was afraid – because I am afraid. Because, on the rare likelihood that some semblance of her still subsists, I don’t want to carry the guilt over not having visited my mother.

But that’s only what I tell myself. There’s more to it. I already know that no matter what I do, she’d only continue lying underneath her gravel home, sheltered by decomposing silk, without a soul or spirit or the capacity for anger. And I know that when I stand over her grave, she isn’t looking up at me with that same childlike look of long ago, watching me lord over her like some condescending god. But I do it all regardless. I do it because in that singular moment when I am standing over dirt and confusing it with my blood and telling it that I miss my mother, I am offered a momentary hope that she hears me and that she loves me for still visiting her even after she’s gone. I do it because I need to lie to myself. I do it because I need her to exist longer than her years allowed her.

And I need this lie – at least for now; for just a little while longer. It reassures me that I’m not squandering my life mourning a hollow carving on a lazily chiseled rectangular stone. It allows me to imagine that somewhere beneath those piles of soil shoveled onto her two months ago, as a cleric recited his book of prayers by rote, she is still there – annoyed by my presence but grateful, and, perhaps, even smiling that her grandchild has come too.

I do it for me. I do it because I am not yet ready to love only a perished memory.

“That one,” Mehran said curtly. “763.”

We approached the lot, passing dozens of buildings identical to hers. They weren’t quite buildings, but edifices, structures that simply homed our dead: synthetic homes meant to console us, homes that meant nothing to the dead whose carcasses laid rotting in its partitions.

Somehow, the number 763 calmed me. It was only a number, I thought; just like B-17-1, her old apartment number. “763” was merely the number to her new apartment, I told myself. Nothing had changed. She had only moved.

Mehran’s eyes were fastened to the number, too. Maybe he was having the same thoughts as I about her apartment. Most likely, he was just staring at a blank space, thinking thoughts I was incapable of interpreting. He was now clutching the box of pastries on his lap with both hands. I wasn’t sure if he knew what to do with them.

Glaring at the arched structure with that little metal door that housed the now-extinct Amini family, I realized for the first time that Mami had been the last one in her family. She had married my father and had taken his name, and with that marriage, she had parted with her ancestry for good. So casually had an entire lineage died away.

Despite marrying young and having two children, Mami had lived quite a life. Her charisma alone had drawn famous artists and poets into her circle of friends; figures that were no more than a nuisance to my brother Farrokh and me when we were children; pests that were taking our mother away from us, that needlessly crowded our homes both day and night. Only with time, when those poets and artists died one by one, memorialized and wept over by a great mass of weeping disciples and written about in monograph after monograph, did I finally appreciate who they were. Only then did I find myself passing many idle hours wondering whether a few of those poems or paintings by her famous friends were based on her, or written for her.

Why I never asked Mami directly – I do not know. Maybe if I had, I could carve out a little place for her in history, too. A passage in a monograph, perhaps; even a footnote. But it is too late now that she is dead. Now, she is nowhere. With her in the grave, all that she’s officially left behind is us. And yet, she deserved so much more than to only be remembered by us.

In fact, I suspect that Farrokh doesn’t even remember her as he should either. After all, he has been absent for many years now. He left for America when we were young, and he’s still there, living a life completely unalike ours, free of mourning or sentiment, in love with an Iranian blonde who is as blonde as she is faithful to him.

“Mami died,” I told him on the phone that day, after endless hours of wondering how to break the news to a faraway brother. His response infuriated me: “you must be relieved,” he said to me.

And I hung up on him. What an ugly thing to say. Your mother died! I wanted to scream at him, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He had left us behind so long ago that Mami was no longer his mother.

She remembered him with such fondness though, and she spoke of him as if I was the unwanted one. He never called, never asked for her or even about her. He was always too busy with his jobs and with his woman, in a life too easy and too routine. I never liked Los Angeles. Maybe I didn’t like it because of him.

Be gone long enough and you will be remembered with rapture, no matter your faults and forgetfulness. That is what longing does to human beings: it creates myths out of the ficklest people. Farrokh isn’t fickle. He is just unaware. Too caught up with himself to care for his surroundings. He likes his routines, because they distract him from himself, but while he was carrying on with those routines, baba had died, Mami had died, his sister had slipped, and his nephew grew into an angry man. He is free from having to watch either of us slowly fade before his eyes. He will never see our spirits and our body decompose in his hands like Mami’s did in mine. He did not see peeling skin and bedsores and her falling teeth; and he’d never know how it felt like to sponge down the scab-ridden back of his mother in an ever-reddening pool of bathwater. He’d only remember her graceful fingers and her pretty voice, and the homely smell of our childhood home and not the smell of rot and sickness and the near-suicidal cigarette smoke snuck behind our backs.

Good for him. He was blessed with his thoughtlessness, and he would never have to suffer like those who saw her in her final years.

At last, I brought myself to look past the number 763, and fixed my gaze instead at the yellow bricks that housed her.

Like a flash, it was the first day again.

Stuck to my seat with my hands glued to the steering wheel, I watched my months-ago self walk out the mausoleum with Nowruz and Mehran.

Nowruz is the first to turn away from us as we step outside the mausoleum. He wants one last look. He ends up clawing at the door, weeping, unable to bring himself to go inside and all the same begging Kamran not to close the doors just yet, pleading, now loudly, for one more glance at Mami. Watching from the windshield, I wished to tell him that there was no Mami left; that even if he pushes past Kamran into the mausoleum again to cry his eyes out for my dead mother that he stole from, his tears would merely tumble down and dry up on a mound of dirt and nothing more. But from where I was, I could only watch.

I kept my eyes fixed on that looking glass, now watching as Afsaneh’s car parks itself beside the mausoleum. Wonderful Afsaneh, my dearest friend – there she is, with that somber look on her face, so ill-fitting to her usually cheery demeanor that it renders the occasion all the more sad. She hugs me first, and I cry into her arms. I am so comfortable with her, not because I know she has gone through the same thing, but because I know that she will let me cry.

Two months ago, the high noon azān had commenced right as we stepped out of the mausoleum, unintentionally compelling the entire world to kneel down and mourn Mami alongside us. And despite my car’s clock telling me that it’s 2:00 PM, I hear that call to prayer once again and continue to watch the past come alive through my windshield. Time doesn’t exist here, after all. It doesn’t concern the dead. Nor does it the mourning.

Afsaneh remained motionless as I momentarily thought these thoughts, her arms in the midst of bending, her eyes sweltering with the need to blink, and my tears suspended in the air, dallying until they can find their way onto her checkered blouse again. Then, as my thoughts ceased, her black coat stains with a final tear. Now, she’s moved away from me, turning to my precious boy. Mehran walks straight into her arms, but he doesn’t cry. Afsaneh whispers something into his ears that none of us hear, nor do we care to hear it; we are all so sad, so lost in our own piteous thoughts.

I watched myself walking to the corner of the sealed mausoleum to squat under the shade and bite at my scarf and murmur Mami, Mami repeatedly, tears suspended only because I couldn’t muster any more of them.

Afsaneh’s driver, dressed in black, is now exiting the car, opening for us a bag he has brought along with him. It’s full of little cakes and juice boxes. Nowruz is the only one to refuse it, as he’s still too busy crying, stuck between real mourning and performance. Only from the windshield did I notice that, all along, he’s been sneaking peeks at the bag of treats from between his tear-stained palms. When the bag has been finally set aside by the mausoleum steps, he approaches it, leans down, and takes one too.

Looking through that magical window, I also noticed, for the first time, how our juice-drinking has briefly transformed our mourning into a farce: here is a hoard of weeping adults struggling to push a tiny straw into a tiny little box all while they continue to gasp for air in despair. I smiled at how the crying ceases the moment they begin drinking from their straws, with each person instinctively walking to their little corners to drink their juice in solitude, their lips puckered as they drink and drink with glassy, childlike eyes.

As I began to laugh aloud, time reared its head again. The sounds of the azān evaporated. My friends and family and Nowruz all dissolved away. And I was left alone with Mehran’s frightening glare.

Quickly, to rid myself of the shame, I exited the car and cautiously strode towards the mausoleum’s doors.

As I took my unhurried steps forward towards Mami, I realized that visiting her was no so different than it had been before. The old elevator ride was now replaced with the walk up the mustard-colored steps, and just as I had always done hundreds of times before, I still had to find my keys and turn the key in the keyhole, and, probably, just as I’d learned to fear, Nowruz would probably be absent again: maybe he was out to get some cigarettes, or maybe he’s angry again at Mami and is sequestered in another room, looking for another of her sister’s smaller paintings to hide in his backpack so as to exact a tiny bit of expensive revenge.

I imagined it all, covered my face and smiled. Her house may have shrunk, I told myself, but at least both her routine and ours remained the same. Here I was, visiting as always, with her lying down as always.

I turned the key and the door opened. And with all my life and all my heart and all my world I expected the smell of Mami’s home; the smell of old age and nostalgia and fresh flowers and cigarettes and books – beautiful books of all kinds; the smell of her clothes and wonderful burnt rice and fresh fruits and pastries and sweets and curtains; and even the smell of her fake plants that had stood the test of time; and the smell of tea and lemons and coffee and leftover Murano pizza that she loved so dearly; and the sight of Nowuz’s excessively-styled hair and the scent of his excessively-sprayed cologne; and baba’s pipe; and Mami’s bed sheets; and her beautiful feet that for some reason hadn’t aged a day; and her tiny ankle-high socks scattered around her bedside; and the sound of Behnam, my childhood friend, now talking about films on the television screen from faraway Washington; and the pictures of Farrokh and me and Mehran and Kamran and the blonde and baba all stuck onto the corners of her mirror; her jewelry and her beads; and the small metal trashcan by her table; and that philosopher’s lamp by her bedside; and her sewing machine aging from across her bed; and the vintage 1960s hair dryer that she never got rid of, which we had to put our heads into because there was nowhere else to sit; and her piles and piles of magazines which she no longer had the concentration to read; and that pretty little bamboo table sitting next to her feeble little body as she laid inside her bed; and the phone on top of that table; and her phone book full with dead names and her tissue box with a singular white tissue at mast full with metaphors of surrender. And then beside all those magnificent things would be my mother: my beautiful mother, with her smile and her eyes and her heavy breathing and her graying hair and her beauty – just her beauty, that’s all I wanted.

But there was no one. There was dust, and there was silence.