Pisgah Road Read online

  Mahyar A. Amouzegar

  This book is a work of fiction. Places, names, characters, situations, and incidences have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. This book is not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author and all incidences are pure invention. All are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental and are not to be construed as real.

  Copyright © 2017 by Mahyar A. Amouzegar

  ISBN: 978-1-62868-208-3

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher and the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Published by Fountain Blue Publishing of California.

  http://www.fountainbluepublishing.com

  First Publishing: June 2017

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. If it was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Book design by Fountain Blue Publishing

  Editing by:

  Jenna D’Angelo

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  DEDICATION

  For M.A.X.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the patience and generosity of Maria, KaWah, Xuxu, Aïda, Todd, and Sharon. I’m also grateful to Fountain Blue Publishing and its fabulous editors: Jenna D’Angelo, Stacy Carter, and Melanie Fountain.

  There is London and then there is the rest of the world.

  You can be alone in London but never lonely, never isolated. You are part of the city, whether you have been there for mere minutes or have lived there for decades. London takes you in completely, and without hesitation. You step off the train, the bus or the taxi that brought you to the city and immediately you are one with it. You can be lost, but if you accept London then the city in return will include you wholeheartedly in its rhythm, in its movement and within its soul. London has its own verve, shared by no other city.

  You can visit Paris, Madrid or Rome, but those cities are inelastic and demarcated. They are unbending to you. They allow you to visit them and they let you live in them, but be assured that they do not want you — not the real you. You have to adapt to those cities, as they will never adjust to you. Their attitude is cliché: love me as I am or leave me. You don’t notice this harsh reality when you visit those cities with friends and family. Your companions desensitize you to truly feeling the solid boundaries built to intentionally guide you. Those cities are like a selfish acquaintance who incessantly reminds you that being in her presence is a privilege. Travel alone in those cities and you will see how lonely and isolated you feel. Those cities do not bend to you — you live on the surface, not as part of them.

  London lets you define it, no matter how minute or transitory the time is that you spent there. You enter the city and at once you have affected it. You add to it. You weigh it down. There is something for you and everyone else in the city. London belongs to single individuals who rush from one tube station to another; it belongs to men and women who refuse to shed their native garb; it belongs to people who refuse to blend in; it belongs to council house residents, a spitting distance from the decadent opulence; and it belongs to all who travel, up and down the streets, with their suitcases in tow. London belongs to a multitude of languages spoken on the streets — English is optional. Randomly exit a tube station and walk to the surface, you won’t be disappointed. The sights, sounds, and smells are different, as each part of the city is a unique contributor to what makes London. Yet, they all say the same thing: be who you want to be and you are welcome. You can be yourself with all your idiosyncrasies. It is a city where everyone will need to use a map, sooner or later. Ask for directions and you shall receive them, even from a tourist who had just landed in Heathrow a day earlier.

  London has something for everyone and my hope is, after so many years of absence, it still has something for me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  I have a business class ticket to London in my pocket. I say ticket but nowadays there’s no such thing. Those narrow long booklets with green or terracotta pages that travel agents used to write the flight information on by hand — with the logo of IATA on the cover — are almost nonexistent. What I have in my pocket is a mere itinerary printed on a piece of paper. We take it on faith that when we get to the airport they will honor this piece of paper. The travel agent assured me several times that it would be fine and that’s how the world worked today. She told me that I had a good deal and I shouldn’t worry about such trifles. That was her word, as if to intimate her wariness of my misplaced nostalgia.

  It’s a discounted ticket and yet it still cost a bit over five grand. I’ve another five thousand left. I had two options: trust her and leave the shop happy or continue asking for more assurances and worry until the day of the flight. I guess if I can trust her with the price, I can trust her with the piece of paper in my pocket as well. I’ve already paid for it, but I still can’t avoid the feeling of being cheated for receiving a sheet of paper that came out of a dot-matrix printer in exchange for hard cash. It didn’t help that she operated from the garage of her home, where she sat in a large executive leather chair next to an old bicycle. Her desk was covered with stacks of paper and her computer whined loudly as she typed in travel agent secret codes. The bookshelf next to her was filled with large binders, none labeled, and on top of it sat a large bottle of Diet Coke and a child’s lunchbox containing white rice covered with goat masala. She had offered some to me and I had refused, so she intermittently ate from her lunchbox with a white plastic spoon. Each time she struggled with the spoon as if it was a barrier between her fingers and her meal. She wasn’t always successful — her fingers glistened with the masala oil, an ink that eventually found its way onto the corner of my ticket as a fingerprint.

  There were two other chairs for the customers, but I couldn’t sit, impatient with her typing, her assurance of the price, and her battle with her food. The rest of the garage was packed with storage boxes and other knick-knacks, each box seemingly labeled in a different language. In the corner of the garage was a workbench and dozens of tools, each shinier than the other. She noticed me looking at the pristine work area and informed me in an apologetic tone that they belonged to her husband. In our first meeting, as I had to come back twice to allow her time to find the right price, she instructed me to ignore the state of her office as it would have no bearing on the quality of the airplane seat. She came highly recommended.

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling sentimental about those old tickets. They used to bring a sense of adventure and mystery. They gave weight to your trip, no matter the destination. The strange notations that travel agents made in the little boxes, the mysterious city symbols and at times fake pricing on the actual ticket all added to the importance of your trip. Now I have a naked piece of paper in my pocket holding no secrets, with every detail of my trip spelled out to its last letter, as if trying very hard to give significance to something cheap. The travel agent gave me a final assuring smile and shook my hand and it was clear we were done.

  I’m going to London for two days. Now, why would a mid-level government employee go to London on a business class ticket for just two days? It’s rather simple: my father told me to go. No, that’s not
really true. He didn’t actually say go to London. In fact, he said nothing about traveling, or London, or even the duration of any hypothetical trip. The time and the destination are of my own choosing though my employer and my past have something to do with it as well.

  I’ve come to believe that I left the best part of me in London and I need to reclaim it if it’s still there, or at least find out if it ever truly existed. Two days should be more than enough to recover ten years of loss, no?

  My father did offer a simple instruction though. That doesn’t matter either, because he’s dead and the ticket is non-refundable.

  II

  My father died a month ago today, almost two months after my mother passed away. You could say it has been an eventful few months. My mother died of an illness but my father, a perfectly healthy man, decided she needed his company and joined her of his own volition. He didn’t ask me, otherwise I would have told him that my mother might not be so pleased to see him so soon. He simply made an assumption and based on that falsehood, decided that he had enough of this world and died in his sleep, without discussing it with me.

  One night — and to be precise, on the night of May 15, 1998 — my father came down to the living room, where I was sitting on the packed moving boxes watching a late night black and white movie, and handed me an envelope full of money — two-hundred slightly used fifty-dollar bills wrapped tightly with rubber bands. The rubber bands had left faint brownish marks on the top bill; the patterns reminded me of something but it stayed elusive no matter how much I stared at them. I finally gave up and put that single bill in a cigar box in my bedroom. I had no intention of spending it.

  That night my father had been wearing the striped blue pajamas that my mother had bought him for Christmas many years earlier. They were light summer pajamas and he had worn them so often that they had lost their color. They looked more like a prison uniform than pajamas. I was sitting on the boxes because there was no other place to sit. We had moved his furniture earlier in the day, but at the last minute he’d decided to spend one more night in his house. The living room had my cardboard throne, a TV that was going to Goodwill in the morning and a floor lamp that barely lit the room. There was an eerie feel to the room, with the flickering light from the TV and the long shadows from the 40-watt lamp.

  My father was a tall man with sandy white hair, large ears and a long nose. My mother used to say the creases on his face made him look more pensive than old. But as with everything, that was a matter of perspective. He had impeccable eyesight though and was in perfect health. He still had a vital life ahead of him.

  He stood by me and put his large hand on my head, as if formally bestowing the makeshift throne to me. I looked up and he smiled and nodded. I nodded back and then we both stared at the TV for a moment. He loved old movies and he taught me to love them as much as he did. But we loved them for different reasons.

  He was fond of them because they brought back memories of a simpler time for him — when the roles and responsibilities of each gender were clearly delineated without any possibility of deviation. He never thought of this as sexist or old fashioned, but as orderly. He was an accountant and as such he felt comfortable when he could put everything in the correct column. The black and white movies did not possess all the ambiguities of the newer movies, which at times forced him to face certain uncomfortable realities.

  I watched them because I could lose myself to the time when part of our contemporary world was only possible in science fiction. My daily job, in a tiny office in an undisclosed location of a nondescript building, kept me in a bubble that felt more like a science fiction world than the real world where people actually lived and worked. I certainly lived amongst regular people, but my connection to them has been kept transitory and vague. I, like my father, longed for a simpler time, but the simplicity for me was based on a notion, possibly a false one, that there was a time where we had more of our humanity, and without admitting it to myself, I watched those movies to keep that thread alive.

  I scooted over and indicated for my father to sit next to me, but he shook his head and continued to stare at the TV. After a few minutes of gazing, he looked over at me and told me he had seen the movie and it was a good one. He then put the envelope on my lap and said: “Don’t spend it well.” I looked up at him puzzled, but he simply kissed me on my head and said goodnight.

  He should have said goodbye, but he didn’t.

  I opened the envelope and stared at the bills that were rolled so tightly together it felt like holding a heavy metal pipe in my hand. It was a strange act by my father and his advice made no sense, so I put the envelope on top of one of the boxes, meaning to speak with him in the morning. He was right, the movie was good and I stayed up late to finish it. It was about a man named Harold McPherson in search of his fiancée, Margaret Sanger, who was a foreign correspondent for a New York newspaper. Margaret had disappeared in North Africa — or at least that’s what he thought, despite the evidence against it — and Harold spent most of the movie desperately going from city to city looking for her. It was a comedy of miscommunication, bad timing, and the thirties’ sexual innuendos. Around two in the morning, I slipped into my sleeping bag.

  Harold found his fiancée only to learn that she was in love with another man. In fact, Margaret had fallen in love with Harold’s friend and former college roommate, a plain-looking, arrogant man with the unfortunate name of William Thurston III. This detail had been revealed to the audience midway through the movie to relay a sense of urgency to Harold’s search. The filmmakers wanted us to applaud Harold’s tenacity as he traveled across North Africa in search of his love, oblivious to the futility of his journey. Yet, I, along with thousands of invisible audience members watching the movie, urged him on his quest, and despite all the evidence against it, hoped for his success. And when he finally met up with his fiancée and was told of the hopelessness of their relationship, and when we were ready to curse Margaret and cry for Harold, he betrayed us by revealing a secret of his own. He loved someone else; he was in love with his childhood sweetheart in Akron, Ohio. He told his fiancée that he hated living in New York and would return home to marry the woman that we, as the audience, never saw and therefore never approved. Nevertheless, and as always, a happy ending.

  I lay in my makeshift bed and wondered for a long time if I were more like Harold or Margaret. Harold didn’t love his fiancée, not really, and yet he endured immense hardship to find her. He needed the closure before he could go to his true love in Akron. Margaret on the other hand knew what she wanted but didn’t have the courage to confront Harold. She conveniently used a small argument to run away from Harold and seek out her lover in North Africa. By 3:30 I still hadn’t come to any real conclusion. Instead a new idea had crept into my mind — perhaps I was more like the nameless invisible sweetheart in Ohio, waiting for my love to make a decision for the both of us. She would still be waiting if Harold had not found Margaret, or if Margaret had stayed faithful, or if William Thurston III was a better friend. I couldn’t come to a conclusion and I stopped thinking about the movie when the possibility of William Thurston III as a potential candidate started to crawl in the periphery of my mind. I tried to empty my mind as I slowly drifted into a dreamless sleep.

  I woke up late, but my father did not stir.

  He had died sometime during the night. He had pulled the blanket all the way to his chin and had rested his arms on top of it, folding his fingers on his chest. There were very few creases on the bed cover, as if he had slipped under the blanket without disturbing the surface. You would think my first reaction would be to run to him, shake him and urge him to wake up. It wasn’t. I knew he was dead as soon as I walked in the room. Death had left a trail of heavy sensation behind and it hit me as soon as I stepped inside. It wasn’t a foul odor of gloom that one expects, but rather a strong sense of calm acceptance. The sunlight was pouring through the naked window, making a shiny passage that separated the bed from the re
st of the room. There was no point in disturbing the tranquil bed to verify what was patently obvious. There was an eerie quiet about the room and even the seemingly ever-present birds had ceased their songs out of respect for him. He had rested on my mother’s side of the bed.

  After a few minutes of staring, I noticed my mother’s little book of poems, perched faced down on the head of the bed. As I walked through the room, the little floating dust bunnies fled as if chased by a giant. I opened the book hoping for a note or a message, but the book was as undisturbed as the blanket that it was resting upon. I wondered briefly if he had finally understood her poems. I very much doubted it. He believed what he wanted to believe. His untimely departure proved it more than ever.

  The room was empty with the exception of the bed. The TV and the bed were the only things left in the house that were not going to the new apartment. He had been staring at the ceiling with a bemused smile on his lips — perhaps he had understood the comedy after all — but when I found him his eyes could no longer speak.

  III

  My mother was in love with two people. My father was not the first. My parents were married on March 12, 1966 in the town of Riverside — Okanogan County, Washington — a month after the start of their courtship. My mother was twenty-four; my father was in his mid-thirties. He loved her from day one and she learned to love him eventually. They wanted to live in a bigger city, so after the wedding they moved to Bend, Oregon and bought a house. They both died in the same house.

  My mother spent the last few weeks of her life at home, tired of the hospital and the hospice. She died in the same bed and on the same side that my father had elected to use as his point of departure. I don’t think it’s romantic. I think it’s rather morbid. The last week of her life was mostly spent in a drug-induced world of oblivion, though at times she would come out of it, as if woken from a dreamy sleep, eager to talk — a cleansing before death.