Ceremony of Doors

Everyone has a quiet smile, like they know you don’t need to be rescued.

 
You have never broken through glass with your fist before. Your hand feels warm, rubbed raw, like your gut. Like a sandstorm, like shame, blistering you from the inside out.

Now your father is running down the steps from his bedroom at two in the morning to the front door where you stand; thick gold glasses frame his face and glitter in the strange red glow of the microwave’s digital clock. He’s yelling but you can’t hear him; you can only hear the cat, who now purrs at your feet, pushing against you, wanting you to pet her. But you’re afraid you’ll get glass in her fur. You’re even more worried she’ll step on the broken shards.

You are in the doorway of another glass door. Inside, the entrance way expands and photographs door the walls. Outside, the speckled walkway narrows like a corn maze leading to the cars, all parked in rows outside the garage. You’re leaving Nowruz celebrations at your grandparent’s house. You’re in the middle of many planes of view, many familiar faces staring at you. Silence. Everyone has a quiet smile, like they know you don’t need to be rescued.

Grandma tells you to look into the mirror she holds on a plate, then dip your fingers into the water. You do. It’s lukewarm. You don’t know if you’re supposed to say something about it. She throws flour on the speckled pavement outside the door. You stand in the doorway, unsure what to do until she makes a shooing motion with her hand, so you step through. Then she holds the plate with the mirror high in the threshold and beckons you back. But you’ve already left the house, so returning is a series of lurches and sporatics; as quickly as you’ve entered, again you’re pushed back.

“Ho-da-ha-fes,” she says, and kisses you hard on your forehead. You are now blessed.

“English for him, please,” your father says, and motions for you to get in the car.

The two of you drive seven hours back home through the snowdrifted mountain passes. In the car you think about all the pictures on the walls of Grandma’s house. There were pictures of all types of door handles in the middle of doors. There were sandy dome-shaped buildings with the heat of the sun beating down on them. There were names of places that you couldn’t pronounce. You ask your father if he has ever been to Iran. He says he was very young. The cat curls on your lap in the backseat and you wonder what was behind all those doors.

Blood pools on the mudroom floor and fills the holes where the concrete didn’t settle right. Your blood. You could have sworn a moment ago, you saw men in red flannel hiding shotguns underneath overcoats, stuffing handcuffs into pockets. Through the glass pane in the door you saw their whitening hands stretching out for the doorknob. They wanted to get you. They were laughing. Fear fluttered, whipped raw and burning behind your ears. You’d failed to lock the door, no matter how many times you turned the deadbolt. It only turned round and round, like some kitchen timer with the spring removed. Now it’s just snow that breaks into the mudroom through the shattered door. Now the only sound is not your scream, but your father apologizing for yelling, taping a bandage to your hand, and sweeping up the broken shards of glass.

You ask, “Will I have to go to the hospital?” You are afraid of hospitals.

He dumps the dustpan of glass into the trash, then gawks at the blood that sticks up sharp in the new snowfall. He shuffles through the doorway to kneel in front of you, drops the dustpan in the snow, and cups your bleeding hand in his own.

“Shit. That’s really bleeding.” He says, but not to you.

He scoops up the rest of the glass that fell in the snow, blood covered and cold. Then he rushes inside, knocking over a bookshelf. Forgetting the dustpan, he hurries back outside to grab the red pan that throbs red in the snow and the lights of the motion sensor outside. His eyes are large and frantic and wide awake when he walks back through the doorway.

“Maybe not, but grab your shoes and meet me at the car anyways. Keep pressure on that.”

You don’t remember the phrase Grandma used, so when you forget your coat, and he forgets his house keys, neither of you go back.

In seven years you will start to learn Farsi. By then, your grandfather will have developed dementia and rarely speak English. Through his fits of lucidity, he’ll wring out stories. You catch a few words before he asks you a question in a language you don’t fully understand. Prison. Father. Library. Laughter. His eyes tear up. Your dad answers for you.

“This is your grandson, Dad.”

You didn’t know he spoke Farsi. He never taught you.

Later, you ask Grandma to tell you the story you couldn’t understand.

“He was living in Isfahan, studying to become a doctor,” her voice melts, like an icicle dripping into a very small pool on the ground. “One day, he took international newspapers out of the library, and books about whatever political organization he was interested in at the time. The librarians must have called someone, or maybe there was an alert on those books, but when he left the library the police were there to take him to jail.”

Your eyes widen at the thought of this frail man shoved into a police vehicle.

“He said, ‘Me? You want me to get in the van?’” she laughs, and looks above your head as though through time you cannot see. “So they take him to jail. And he’s there for a night, and all the men in the jail—the prisoners—start asking him why he’s there. He says, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong!’ and they all laughed and laughed. He said, ‘No! I just took out books!’ and then they understood that he was a political prisoner. So they had a nice night in prison and he felt very safe. The next morning, the police let him out, and his father came to pick him up from the jail.”

“And then what?” you ask. The story can’t be over.

“And then they went home,” she says. “He found out later, once the war began, that the government was getting the police to shoot anyone who opposed their… whatever, political beliefs. So his father had paid these policemen to bring him to jail instead. That way, his father saved his life. But we don’t really know if any of it would have happened or not, because we came here shortly after.”

You want to tell them that you’re scared. You want to wake up from this horrible dream.

At the hospital you and your father wait for what feels like years. Behind her glass window, the receptionist clicks on her keyboard as your father answers questions like your age, your blood type, your citizenship, why your hand is cut.

“I think he was just dreaming,” he says.

The emergency waiting room is long, white, and rectangular. Grey plastic seats secured to horizontal metal bars frame the room. Two men in red flannel flop in grey seats and stare at the television hung from the corner. One man’s arm is in a sling. Refugees come to Canada, escaping war and terror. The men in red flannel shake their heads.

“Go back where you came from,” they mutter to themselves. But they’re looking at you.

The doctor gives you six stitches. You don’t feel a thing.

You dream for seven years, and in your dreams your grandfather pulls you on his lap and, in his wheelchair, rolls you to a prison cell. Before he leaves you in the cell, he says, “Safe travels.” Then he coughs and coughs sand that fills the room. A sandstorm whips into your eyes and your ears and up your nose and against the walls and the ceilings and the floors. When it clears and you can see again, your father and your grandmother are standing in your cell with you. The walls and ceilings around your small cell have been polished into mirrors, and your bodies are transposed to both sides of every bar.

You want to tell them that you’re scared. You want to wake up from this horrible dream. Instead you tell them that you can’t find the cat, that she’s gone missing, that she can’t find her way back home.

Your grandmother steps forward and says, “Not English. Please.” She walks as though pushed back by a strong, cold wind towards the unlocked cell door where the keys hang and sway untouched by any hand. The men in red flannel round the corner of the mirrored hallway.

“Let me out! Let me out!” You scream, but can’t move because your father has zip-tied you to the bars of your cell.

He says, over and over, “Keep pressure on that. Keep pressure on that,” like you’re the wound, like you’re hurting.

The men in red flannel are reaching for the steel door handle and your grandmother’s wrist is turning, the liver spots on the back of her hand move through the mirrors on the ceiling and walls like the moon in a night sky ticking to daylight.

“Help me.” It sounds like a prayer as it comes out of your mouth.

Grandma and your father smile at you. Like you don’t need rescuing. She takes the key with her, then steps through the bars into the mirror, and disappears. He follows, becoming impossibly thin and refracted at every angle and then too, gone. The men in red flannel pull on the bars, on the doors, on your ties, trying to free you. They want you to walk back through the doorway. The bars turn to icicles and lukewarm water runs down the whole length of your back. You punch the glass.