An Emotion of Great Delight

certain he would die. His most recent stint in the hospital had lasted two weeks; everyone expected the worst. I’d made plans for his death, had imagined my future in the wake of his absence. It had seemed to me like a foregone conclusion that my father would die. His first heart attack had seemed to me a kind of poetic justice, the kind meted out by the Most Just, made possible by Providence.

Dear God, I thought. Am I being punished for kissing a boy?

I’d been listening, of course, had always been listening to the details my mother and sister provided about my father’s situation. After his first heart attack they’d done something called a coronary angiography, which helped them determine where, exactly, the blockage had occurred. After that they placed a stent in his heart, a relatively straightforward procedure that involved inserting a piece of metal inside a blocked artery to help open the valve and increase blood flow to the heart. It seemed, at the time, like a scary procedure, but he was discharged a few days later, and after a couple of nights at home, was cleared to go back to work. Everyone thought he’d be all right.

When the second heart attack hit, things got complicated.

This one was worse. More aggressive.

A blood clot developed where the stent had been placed, shutting everything down. There was real fear now, even in the doctors’ voices, about how such an occurrence was extremely rare, how my father might be at greater risk than they suspected. Suddenly there was talk of open-heart surgery. Suddenly he was being examined for more than a heart attack—he was being examined for heart disease.

It was confusing.

My father was a healthy man who didn’t smoke or drink or eat a great deal of red meat. He exercised regularly and looked pretty fit for his age. But his cholesterol levels had suddenly skyrocketed, something his doctor determined was a result of crushing external stress. Emotional stress.

The doctors really wanted to avoid open-heart surgery. It was an extreme surgery, with crippling side effects and a long recovery, so they wanted first to try an alternate route. More stents, beta blockers, statins—these were the words I’d heard thrown around over and over again. The doctors performed a couple more procedures on him, but each one left him lower, more lethargic, needing longer and longer to recover. The angioplasty—the surgical procedure that precedes the placement of a stent—required cutting opening a vein in his thigh, and the last time I’d seen him he’d been lying there with a sandbag on his lap, a necessary precaution to keep the wound from reopening. They’d been monitoring him for longer than was usual, keeping him in the hospital until his levels dropped below a certain number. His cholesterol was so high they were worried he’d have another heart attack.

This one, they said, might kill him.

I’d not doubted it would. I’d been waiting for that call, for the moment that would redefine my life, make sense of my brother’s death, establish some kind of existential equilibrium. I’d been waiting for it, praying for it—

And now he was coming home.

I didn’t know how to feel.

I didn’t know that I wanted to feel anything at all.

I sighed as I turned over, pressed my cold face against the cold pillow. I was curled up like a fiddlehead, my frozen feet tucked against each other. No matter how hard I tried to create friction under the heavy covers, my body would not warm. I shivered, squeezed my eyes shut, listened to the faint ticking of the clock above my desk. Listened to my racing heart.

It had never stopped pounding.

My heart was still beating so hard it was beginning to scare me, beginning to hurt. It thudded dangerously in my chest even now, in the dead of night, made it somehow impossible to breathe. I did not know how to describe what I was feeling, what I was thinking. I’d been trying to disregard the entire night, trying to bury it the way I buried all else that troubled me, but this—somehow this was different. I had lost my head when my heart was most exposed, easily pierced. Recovery, I realized, would be slow.

I thought of God.

I had broken a rule by kissing Ali, had snapped in half a piece of dogma, kicked to the ground a religious guidepost. It wasn’t the first time I’d done as much, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but I was disconcerted nonetheless.

Even Mehdi, I knew, would’ve been stunned.

Mehdi was three years older than Ali, and the two of them had grazed each other’s lives in the way those of their stratum did. Ali and Mehdi were that specific vintage of beautiful Muslim teenager who showed up at the mosque only occasionally, usually for major events and holidays, and often forced into attendance by their parents. They found religion equal parts compelling and ridiculous, and were generally uncertain about God. But it was precisely their lack of firm conviction that made it easier for them to assimilate—made it easier for them to belong to many groups, as opposed to one.

I’d always envied that kind of freedom. It would’ve been easier, I often thought, to have been exactly that variety of half-hearted Muslim, one who could more easily walk away from faith in order to be accepted.

What was it like? I wondered, to slough off this skin when convenient, to be looked upon by the world as something other than a cockroach. I feared I’d never know. I’d always carried with me a burden of conviction I could not set down. I could not deny the beliefs that shaped me any more than I could deny the color of my eyes.

It made for a lonely life.

There was no refuge for my brand of loneliness. I was neither Iranian enough to be accepted by Iranians, nor American enough to be accepted by my peers. I was neither religious enough for people at the mosque,