In the Charles de Gaulle Airport, people rarely notice one another for long; they scan their tickets and the reader boards nervously, missing the faces and scenes in between. The teen-age boy watching Merhan knows who he is--an Iranian whose papers were stolen in Brussels and who has been trapped in this seam between Britain and France for six years--and is trying to get up the nerve to speak to him. He stands with his hands in his pockets, a school bag high on his back, looking away every time he comes close to locking eyes with Merhan. In the past, reporters who came to write a story about Merhan's airport exile had bolted toward him belligerently, occasionally startling him mid-sentence. For the middle-aged man is writing a memoir Solzhenitsyn-style, composing and memorizing a sentence or two a day and adding to a string of sentences wound tight in his head. The memoir grows longer as his stay in the airport lounge continues.
     Unlike Solzhenitysn, of course, Merhan has free access to paper and pens, boxes in which to store his notes and manuscript, reading material of all sorts (all of it abandoned by travelers as they board their flights), and, most important, no jailer imposing silence upon him. Many reporters have encouraged him to write about his plight (and that's what they always called it, a plight--like some mispronunciation of yet another missed flight), in order to free himself; in order to make a little money off the juncture of confusion, bureaucracy and isolation his life has become. But Merhan composes his daily sentences in the same sense of defiance Solzhenitsyn did, defiance not against hard-mouthed jailers, but against an insanity he, as yet, only sees through his peripheral vision: the clutter of metal detector and X-ray that form the boundary of this tiny, fluorescent non-country.
     Today's sentence: I wait for the horizon to slither into the ocean.

* * *

When their interview finally begins, the teenager, Dany insists on walking several laps around the terminal. Dark-haired and thin, he volunteers that his father, with whom he had recently been reunited, is Iranian like Merhan. His mother, he adds, is a French woman. Merhan marvels at the mixed-race child, feeling he can separate the French nose from the Iranian eyes, as if Dany were assembled of far-flung parts that showed the wear of traveling long distances.
     Dany explains his errand haltingly. English is difficult for him, but he knows from the newspaper article that Merhan does not speak French.
     "A project for school," he says. In his photography course, his latest assignment is to approach someone he doesn't know and take his photograph.
     "Mr. Delahaye says he can see in the photo if we know the person or not. So we can't cheat," Dany says.
     And how is that? Merhan wonders. Is it the tension between strangers translated into the texture of the photo? Wariness as a collection of dark broad strokes, a curtain behind which some intimate magic agitates.
     "And you wish to photograph me?" Merhan asks. Photographers accompanying the reporters had done so before. Merhan hadn't then known whether he was expected to smile. He usually did--with his mouth closed. He has never seen any of the newspaper photos taken of him for none has appeared in the papers de Gaulle travelers left behind. He knows what such photographs looked like, though. The polka-dot matrix barely allowing the figure to emerge--the way the background was lost, shapeless and murky.
     "When I read your story in the newspaper, I wanted to know what you look like," Dany says simply. The story had recounted the initial theft of Merhan's travel documents, his plan to return to Britain to reapply for a residence permit thwarted by British immigration agents, and finally, his return to the De Gaulle Airport to wait (who knew for how long) for readmission to England. According to the newspaper, Merhan with only fifty dollars on his person. Airline stewardesses and pilots gave him snack-bar vouchers and toilet kits intended for weather-stranded travelers. He used his money to pay for phone calls.
     On their third lap, they pass a plate glass partition and in it Merhan sees his own dark hair and swinging arms. Washed out in the glare of the overhead fluorescent lighting, Merhan's bright eyes search for themselves and catch, instead, Dany's round shoulders and the chrome of his sunglasses perched on his forehead like artillery on a tank.
     "No, I don't think I want my photograph taken, thank you," Merhan says, his politeness smooth and glass. He has become reserved over the course of these years. He doesn't want Dany to take this refusal personally, but since he became trapped in the Charles De Gaulle Airport he follows his intuitions very strictly. He feels that Dany thinks him a freak, comparable to a bearded woman or a contortionist. Merhan is shy; he has no interest in performing the role of pathetic stateless jester for anyone. Least of all, a fashionably exotic French teenager.
     Dany stops in his tracks. Taking has backpack off, he rummages through the front pockets and produces a single photograph, holds it before Merhan's eyes. The photo is of a man roughly Merhan's age; Dany's father, the teenager confirms. There is certainly nothing freakish about the man. He looks like a working stiff, a shy man until you put a shovel or pick-axe in his hands; then he frets the ground with elegant, aggressive designs.
     Dany's photograph makes Merhan want to talk with his father, to ask him about his journey from Iran to France, to tell him of his own backaches and all-too-temporary insights. Dany makes photographs to satisfy his curiosity about the world and simultaneously makes others curious about what he has found and recorded. Merhan has no idea how a boy so young manages this. He wants a picture of himself like this one, one that shows a man ready to dig or break or balance, one that shows a man as he appears, and not as he disappears.
     "I have my camera here today," Dany says.
     "I suppose I could use an author photo for my memoir if it is published," Merhan says. "I assume you work cheaply."

* * *

Dany leads Merhan to a bank of molded plastic chairs and takes his camera out of his backpack. He fiddles with the lense, smiling at Merhan periodically and assuring him that his preparations won't take long. The early evening arrivals surge around them. Merhan watches people stop in confusion or disappointed expectation ten or twelve feet from the gangway door. Few of these business travelers are greeted by family at this hour, but almost every one of them pauses and looks for a familiar face, not wanting to rush past that loved one who might have come after all.
     Dany presses the shutter button without asking Merhan to look at the camera. Hearing the clicking advance of the film, Merhan positions himself squarely in front of the boy. His hands hang at his sides. The teenager walks toward him. Merhan raises his eyebrow, a gesture his estranged wife Tahereh used to say made him look like his own father. Visions of himself, upside-down and then right-side-up in the camera's workings, wash over him like waves of water scouring a beach-head.
     Merhan's mother died when he was a child. His aunt took care of him until he started school. Then his father took charge of his education. Merhan's father had seen to it that Merhan studied hard and made plans for his future. When Merhan settled on anthropology, his father wrinkled his nose. Merhan wanted to see the world, though. He wanted to tread it end to end. Finally, Merhan's father consented and Merhan was accepted at the University of Birmingham on scholarship.
     Merhan's father had never even traveled on an airplane. When Merhan first arrived in Birmingham, his father mentioned visiting quite often, as if it would be the most ordinary turn of events for the aging man. His father's ardent interest in European countries dictated the portrait of England that Merhan conjured. Birmingham, a violent, run-down city, had to be lush with a shade of green his father had never seen; nothing else would do. The scent of the badly polluted river had to raise dropping flowerheads and shine up their stems and leaves. This foreign world had to be worth the loss of a beloved child. So for Merhan, it was worth lying.
     Dany lowers the camera. His blue eyes dilate for a short moment. He rubs the right one and raises the camera again.
     "Why don't you sit down here, so I have the sun behind me?"
     "Here?" Merhan asks. He sits erect with his hands on his knees.
     "That's fine," Dany says.
     "So do you understand this machine you handle?" Merhan asks.
      Dany nods. "M. Delahaye taught us the entire history of photography and how the first cameras were made. Before we got to use these, we had to make pinhole cameras for ourselves.," he says.
     "What is a pinhole camera?"
     "It's just a box, really, with one hole poked in it for light to get through and a place to feed film in opposite the hole. Whatever light is coming from the object the pinhole is pointed at when you expose the film is what turns up there. It gives you a good idea of how to see the thing you're photographing in terms of light it gives off . That's how I know when the sun is behind you, my film is getting too much light. If I left you there, the light bouncing off of you couldn't compete with the light coming from behind you.
     "But right here, the light is falling on you and making you easier to see," Dany concludes.
     "Do you still have that pinhole camera?" Merhan asks, the anthropologist in him fascinated by the home-made machine. He wondered how big it was, what it was made of.
     "I do. I'll bring it when I come to show the photos," Dany says.
     "Only if it's no trouble," Merhan says.

* * *

Merhan was a careless man. Keys left in the ignitions of cars, banknotes used as bookmarks gone missing after the books had been loaned out with enthusiastic recommendation, windows left open to a swirling rainstorm. Each time he outran a mistake, he felt a floating sense of relief. As if his luck was only his if he ran it up a flagpole for others, like his wife, to admire. Phrases like, "Merhan, you fool," or "What a close call that was" secretly pleased him. His luck had been what made him stand out from others. Then, at a customs desk in Britain, the luck ran out.
     Years before he lost his papers, Merhan despised travel for the energy it drained from him, for the slights and oversights he suffered at the hands of airport and airline staff. Many people treated him like he stunk, like their distance was sanitary and prudent rather than political and racist. Even the way the customs agents handled Merhan's travel documents, the way they craned their necks to read them as he set them down without their touching them. Suspicion and distaste covered Merhan's papers like giant red thumbprints. Merhan was used to having these sheets of paper pushed back at him in silence.
     His imagination raced, when the tall, broad-faced British agent not only touched Merhan's papers but snatched and hid them under the lip of the counter.
     "What's the matter, Sir?" Merhan asked.
     The agent waved his question away. The man never looked Merhan in the eye, until he, along with two other agents, had led Merhan to a room downstairs, one of the many windowless rooms Merhan would discover in his trips along the international bureaucratic circuit, always walking briskly behind a jacketed officer.
     Criminals withstand such treatment by thinking as they are hustled into and out of holding rooms, You people don't know the half of it. Badness and criminality were forms of depth and stubbornness. Merhan, in the same situation, was actively trying to break his long-held habits of oblingness and grace because he sensed that these qualities made him seem weak, and worse, guilty. So he set his jaw, steadied his eyelids, and explored the idea that in moments like these men become thoroughly bad. They forget their lives outside.
     Merhan also knew that many foreigners lost their papers deliberately, becoming stateless so they could emigrate more easily to Britain, France, Germany, and others. He hated the thought that these uniformed men lumped him together with these unimaginative and brutish characters. Unlike them, Merhan had disdained settling permanently in what he still considered a foreign place. He wanted a chance to explain this to these men.
     Many such chances came but he kept muffing the telling of his life story. In the first place, he never knew how much time he had to tell it. And in the second, the time limit seemed always to be changing. Rushed from one of these encounters to the next, he wanted to repeat the story exactly as he told it before. So he talked slowly, focusing his mind, not upon the events themselves--his flight from Iran, his studies in England, the robbery, the infrequent contact with aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters spread across three continents, the lack of contact with his wife, whom he knew to be living and working in southeast Belgium, so close to where he had been robbed, but on the faces of his interrogators.
     He wanted the agents who drifted with him from one interview to the next to corroborate his accounts. He became distracted too by waiting for them to confirm or deny his speech by their facial expressions. He had to fight to keep his story from incorporating these features.
     The British customs officials didn't deport Merhan because they suspected him to be a terrorist or a fugitive. It was bad luck that sent him hurtling back to the de Gaulle Airport. If it was any consolation to him, a few of them told his story at home during dinner the night they put him on the plane. They lingered over the theft in the Brussels train station, imagining him reaching all the way back into the space where his suitcase had been, dumb-founded by the bulky item's disappearing act. Of the moment Merhan gave up and knew that there was nothing more he could do alone.
     Nonetheless, pity failed to bend British law. His theft documentation was no proof of nationality, nor would it entitle him to any sort of naturalization, despite the fact he had studied in Birmingham for four years. Seventy-two hours after he landed in London, he was escorted onto an Air France DC-8 and flown back to Paris. Though he didn't speak French, he prepared himself to accept and perhaps embrace this country. For if Britain didn't want him (and this by now he couldn't deny), then he didn't want Britain either. He wanted a country where hospitality meant something, where a man driven to abashment was as a matter of course spared further pain. Though he couldn't say it to himself as he breathed in the diesel and polyester of the plane's cabin, he wanted Iran.
     In Paris, the customs agents had been considerably harsher with Merhan, which, in Merhan's opinion, had more than a little to do with the language barrier. The number of French agents that spoke no English shocked him. French sounded like an endless stream of tired commands, as if everyone in this country was on the nightshift and charged with the unpleasant task of firing his underling. The translator they brought first had too much trouble understanding Merhan's accented English. So it was with relief and irritation that Merhan agreed to wait for a Persian translator. As he waited, Merhan went over English verb conjugations in his head obsessively. He saw the raw forms of words cascading down the middle of the ranks he pictured. English, the language that had served as his shiny lifeboat through several pleasant years in Birmingham, now sat in dry-dock, its many nicks and abrasions apparent as soon as it was drawn from the water.
     A neatly dressed Iranian woman finally arived to serve as Merhan's translator. Merhan then expected to resume communication freely as he had in London, adding of course the indignities that led to his expulsion days ago. But the woman seemed not to hear him as she dutifully translated his speech. It didn't matter that the two shared an ethnicity, a language, a homeland. Merhan was a bad penny, indeed. With his now damp, creased papers affirming not citizenship but lost luggage, he repelled aid. No one wanted to be thanked or fondly remembered by one of his ilk.
     As the windowless rooms shared a logic and a structure across a sea channel and hundreds of miles, so did the government agents and personnel, blue versus brown coats, Anglo or Gallic. Sympathy for Merhan was at a premium as he drew closer to a point of stasis, the Charles De Gaulle Airport itself. On one hand, the British had listened to his story. Merhan was even under the impression that they had coaxed it out of him. As audiences go, they were ideal: respectful, appreciative, quiet. He hadn't realized, as he did squirming before these impatient and dry French officials, that he had actually been dying to lay the whole thing out like a streethawker displaying his wares.
     Here in France, they would suffer it, all right, they would listen. But no languid pleasure in telling could seep into Merhan's voice. In France, Merhan's life story was a series of answers all about the same length to a set of unvarying questions. His own story, he saw in the light of this antiseptic and ungenerous reception, was the story of too many. Although he was soon to be singularly trapped in the Charles de Gaulle Airport, his crime was having far too common a story, one of movements and renunciations and insufficiently thought-through bargains that made his life cheap. A cheap life requires no freedom, fresh air, property. Everything in such a life can and should be balled up or smashed down, made small as possible.
     When they realized that they had no place to send him, the French agents began leaving Merhan in the public lounge instead of alone in the holding room. They couldn't send him to Iran, nor back to Britain though the admonished the British agents freely for their cowardice. Calls went out to Benelux, Denmark, Sweden, Norway; then the United States, Canada, Argentina. Merhan was like the garbage scow that circled the earth one summer; without his knowing it, he was rejected a dozen times in a week. Though the lead agent in the case had no particular interest in comforting Merhan, neither did he want the man to settle himself in the lounge for a long haul. So the agent assured Merhan continually that it wouldn't be long until his departure; on Mondays he said it would be by the end of the week; on Thursdays or Fridays, at the beginning of the following week. Not long after, when his business took him through the lounge, this agent charged through without looking to either side. Eventually he avoided the area altogether.
     Merhan's situation became a condition. He hired a Parisian immigration lawyer who visited him in the lounge, resting his open briefcase on his knees as they spoke. The agents maintained their story that he was to be sent on to another location shortly. The relatives he contacted promised to take action on his behalf.
     Of all his relations, beside his father, he put off contacting his estranged wife Teherah the longest. He wasn't sure that regaining his freedom was worth re-establishing his connection to her. When he finally called her in Liege where she had found work, she listened to his story without interrupting him and agreed to help him without a single mocking comment.
     But, he learned, because he had been the one to desert their marriage, she had no way of salvaging a nationality for him. The immigration officials were more interested in the desertion than they were in Merhan. They were keen to know how Teherah was surviving financially. The governments of Belgium and France told the couple what they had known as soon as they crossed the Iranian border: Their connection to one another was not strong enough to withstand much.
     Teherah promised to continue seeking solutions for Merhan and also to contact his father in Iran. Merhan fretted. A father shouldn't have to visit his son's misfortune in this way. This bad luck shouldn't be able to jump borders and phone lines, traveling like a wind-borne virus, a miasma. Teherah promised to lie for Merhan. Extra copies of your copies, the insurance you would have wanted had you known, she promised. Nothing more than that. Your father will be none the wiser.
     Hanging up the pay phone and calculating his remaining cash, Merhan thought long about Teherah, about all of the refugees in Europe. And not just the ones trapped in unfamiliar cities or living in bureaucratic interstices. He felt for Teherah's struggle to discover what a normal life might be: living near a train station and waitressing evenings; for the boyish Croatian amputee who tried to help him when he first discovered his suitcase was gone. For the Vietnamese street vendors and their naturalized children, who impatiently translated for their parents at the bank and in the immigration offices. Even the Somali businessman dressed to the nines in a crisp blue suit and leather loafers earned his anxious attention. The Somali was more fortunate than the others. But he was still part of a perilous system that depended on continuous motion and displacement.
     When he talked to Tahereh next, she reported that his father was fine, that she could scarcely end the phone call because he had so many questions about his son. She answered the best she could. His sentence for the day came to him as he stared at the lens of Dany's camera.
     I wait for the fine restless latitudes of earth be coaxed into bows then sealed into knots.

* * *

Jet propulsion rattles the windows. Another plane lights up and takes to the sky. Dany snaps and snaps until there are no pictures left on the roll. Merhan watches with interest as Dany rewinds the film and unloads the camera and puts the film in the front packet of his backpack. On Dany's back Merhan will slip out of the Charles de Gaulle Airport without triggering so much as a warning bell. He will bathe in cool chemical waters, hang from a taut line as he used to hang from a tree limb kicking the leaves with his unshod feet. He will parade among school fellows, be presented with great ceremony to the discerning M. Delahaye who will affirm that Dany doesn't know Merhan; indeed the boy has no idea.
     "It's due the day after tomorrow, so I've got to hurry and develop this roll," Dany says. "I will bring you copies next week for sure."
     "Good," Merhan says. "I look forward.

* * *

Around eleven most nights the lounge becomes dusky and still. At this hour Merhan fears being mugged as he sleeps.      
     I wait for mourning doves to train the wind to sing their ache-song.
     He misses his wife, though they have been apart for almost ten years. He misses listening to her turning and reaching in their small lavatory, the cupboard closing quietly, the way a moth resting on a window would transfix her momentarily and he would only know it by the seconds of silence, followed by more rustling and tapping.
     I wait for the wheel of forgiveness to kiss the rain-filled rut in the road.
     At this hour, Merhan goes into the lavatory opposite the ticket counters and gates and changes into his other set of clean clothes. He washes one article of today's clothing at a time, starting with his pants. Merhan never washed an article of clothing until he lived apart from Teherah.
     The water runs over them until it soaks the fabric. He kneads them against the bottom of the sink a few times and then uses them to stop up the drain so the bowl fills to its rim. Rubbing the green handsoap flakes into the fabric, he beats the water until it produces suds. He watches his reflection in the mirror as he does this. The light in the lavatory is so dim that his face seems washed of its features; he smiles. Or he flares his nostrils as he imagines a flamenco dancer or a toreador might. An outlandish gesture, unlike him, and yet it suits him, suits the man who will leave this airport one day soon.
     He lifts the pants as if they are his red cape and water pours from them, onto the floor. Only a dappling of suds remains. Running the water again, he rinses and wrings, feeling his biceps flex, the joints in his hands becoming sore. Snap, he whips the pants at the sink. Snap, the crack of the wet fabric, the impact, resound in the empty bathroom and there is a slight ringing in the toilet bowls and Merhan's ears.
     Hanging the pants over the formica door of a toilet stall, he takes up his dirty shirt and undoes the bottom few buttons.
     No planes will crash here tonight. Few thoughts of escape or transport will trouble him. By the time he awakens, all of his clothes will be dry and if he forgets to remove them from the stall door, a custodian will deliver them to him, like a valet.
     I wait for the grandiose spider to disappear in the pores of her web.
     Reporters have asked how he deals with the sexual urges that pass through him. There is no sure-fire method. Merhan's imagination has been his ally and his enemy. What cools his ardor faster than anything is the idea that a woman who might give herself to him would be doing so because (so his reasoning goes) he is a man a woman is almost sure to have power over. He is trapped. This is why women seek prisoners as correspondents and marry them; the marriages lasting perhaps a week longer than the prison sentence.
      Merhan's marriage to Tahereh broke up as soon as the two migrated to the West for similar reasons. Tahereh took care of him all their married life in Iran. She kept house, counted change, reminded her husband to drop things off or pick them up. During their initial journey west, however, Merhan took charge. If it had been up to Tahereh they never would have made it past their own doorstep. She was always looking behind her, fearful that someone might thwart them, though Merhan's studies furnished them with visas and a stipend. Merhan looked ahead, kept their tickets in his jacket pocket. When smooth talking was necessary, he jumped right in as if he had been born to it.
     Once they had reached Birmingham where Merhan was to study anthropology, Tahereh insisted on an apartment in an immigrant neighborhood some distance from the university. This Merhan didn't mind terribly, for he also liked seeing his countrymen in the street; he liked to hear his native tongue. Then, however, Tahereh began inviting other Iranian emigres to their apartment regularly. Many of them treated Merhan with a familiarity that he disliked. In response, Merhan stayed away, walking the close streets of the city, riding the bus all night long reading German anthropologists of the nineteenth century. It got so Tahereh never knew when to expect him. Whenever he did turn up, he said he had been at a conference. They lived on together, but no longer spoke of having children.
     Two years into their stay, in the aftermath of the events of '79, Tahereh's tendency was to side with the students. She never left the apartment. The West had dirtied her enough. Merhan, by contrast, felt ashamed at his countrymen's behavior. He disliked the Shah, but found the taking of hostages horrifying. The images of the blindfolded men sitting in the same corner on the floor day after day haunted him. He stopped studying. Then he moved his things from the apartment, leaving his checkbook behind, using their disagreement over the revolution as his pretext for leaving. But this wasn't really the reason he left. He simply wanted to be free of her fearfulness and her complaining. The apartment was a cocoon of homesickness and it never failed to depress him. How she wound up in Belgium when his money ran out he did not know. Why she never returned to Iran, he didn't know either.
Merhan returned to his studies and took his degree; he began teaching part-time and made just enough money to get by year to year. He sought permanent political asylum in Britain, but put off applying for citizenship. He saw no reason to bother.
     The only thing Merhan missed in eighteen years away from home was his father. Until Merhan's immigration problems began, they spoke on the phone weekly. His father moved in with his cousin's daughter shortly after the Revolution. Having Merhan in Britain caused him some difficulty in the early days of the Islamic Republic, but in the last five years things had quieted down. Now he was just an old man in indifferent health who sat in the corner of the kitchen and told stories of his son who had made it to the West.
     An oceanic murmur washes through the lounge. The security bells going off sporadically have a solemn beauty. They are the sound of the terminal breathing. The sound of holes being poked in the lid of a jar that contains a single luminous green caterpillar. He winds his thread around the stick he finds handy, stares at the single leaf pushed against the rim and lid of the jar. He goes to sleep inside his cocoon dreaming only of that leaf.
     I wait for caterpillars to spin their mysterious wounds around themselves.

* * *

Early in the morning a few days later, a security agent whom Merhan knew but who had recognized him with more than a flinch beckons him to a security checkpoint and, for a split second, Merhan thinks they are finally letting him go. He breaks into a sweat and quickly makes sure all of his belongings are secure. He drags his boxes with him, as if there is only a slim window of opportunity. When he arrives at the desk, a woman hands him the telephone and he hears Tahereh's voice. The ping of the security alarm is loud and frequent, as if a passel of terrorists is crowding through the metal detector. He focuses on a red light, then on the X-ray screen in front of him, a collection of bright white outlines--ghosts sailing by him at what seems like a million miles an hour.
     As Tahereh tells Merhan that his father died a week ago and was buried yesterday, he fights the urge to slam the telephone down and run for the doors at the far end of the concourse. Always the bearer of bad news, he intones to himself, always bad news. He presses the receiver into his ear, focusing on the heat and pressure in order to distract himself from the rising and falling of his stomach. He doesn't know if he can make it to the bathroom in time. The lounge is an obstacle course, so many bags strewn across the floor.
     He rushes through the simple maze that forms the entrance to the bathroom. Thankfully, it is empty. He grips the toilet so tightly that his knuckles turn white. In his mind's eye, he is knocking his front teeth against the rim of the bowl over and over again. His teeth grind into a fine dust that coats his tongue. This powder coats the floor on which he kneels and dissolves in the water before him. He stands and moves to the sink to wash his face. This is where he is standing when Dany looks around the entrance partition and catches his eye in the mirror.
     Merhan hits the top of the faucet as if to staunch the flow of water from the tap. The water won't stop. The more he hits it the longer it runs. He looks over at Dany who works his school bag off his shoulders and sets it down on the counter. Wordlessly, Merhan moves past Dany, clipping his shoulder as he barges through the exit. The powder still seems to float from the ceiling.
     The hunched man pinches his arm to stop himself from seeing the powder everywhere. When this doesn't work, he rushes to the window to see if it is falling outside as well. He strides to the closest plate of glass as if he is going to go straight through it. Instead he stops abruptly and stares at the morning sunshine, the waiting planes casting shadows on the tarmac. There is nothing amiss out there.
     He walks back to the security checkpoint and gathers his belongings, then heads to the snack bar. There are no mirrors here. Only bright yellow and pink linoleum counters, scattered with used sugar packets and bits of torn styrofoam. Merhan rests his head on the counter, feeling the discarded bits of paper pressing into his brow. As an anthropologist, he is dumb-founded that he finds himself in a place that utterly defeats any possible ritual of mourning.
     Dany spots Merhan and approaches the counter with his hand outstretched. He slides his photographs toward Merhan as if they are his own travel documents and he is seeking gingerly to gain entrance into the older man's country.

* * *

Merhan inspects the the photographs. He spreads them across the yellow formica bar, so that he can look at them all at once: a very slow film. Merhan is surprised at how happy he looks in the photographs. His father had taught him that the bravest face was not clenched in determination; it was the face of lightness and deception, the one that did not ask to have its burdened shared. He is impressed with his ability to dissemble until he arrives at the last photo. In this one, Dany has caught Merhan turning away. In Merhan's peripheral vision, in the glare and heat of a hot dog rotisseries turning, the emptiness of the concourse looms. This last photo is like a mouse tail disappearing into a hole.
     "So your teacher was satisfied that you don't know me," Merhan finally says.
     "He didn't mention that in specific," Dany says. "He gave me a good grade."
     "They are good photos. And just think, one day they will will lead some anthropologists to an understanding of France in the late twentieth century," Merhan says.
     "Do you think they'll be thrown off by the fact that you don't look French?" Dany asks.
     Merhan slides the photo back and forth on the counter. "It could be that he will conclude that this confusion of races was a key factor in the fall of French society."
     "There are already people who say that," Dany says.
     Merhan nods.
     "There is a tribe in New Guinea," Merhan begins, "whose members believe that there are invisible holes all over the earth, each man and woman has a destined hole through which he or she will fall. Life can be lived in fear of that hole, they believe, or it can be spent making a matching hole in the sky. All of their major rituals--those surrounding birth, death, marriage--require participants to lie on their backs and examine the sky; sometimes in silence, sometimes with a welter of drums churning. Around them, tribal elders take large sticks and test the ground around them.
     "Apparently when the ceremony is finished, the participants have to fight their fear of the ground beyond the portion that the elders have tested. Their walking is practically dancing; they test each step ahead of them like ballerinas pointing their toes in the direction they wish to step."
     "How do they make holes in the sky?"
     "The method differs from tribe to tribe. In some, making the hole or passage into heaven is strictly a matter of conquering fear. Those who have the courage to walk without testing the ground ahead of them go to heaven. The rest, who go on looking for a hole, find one eventually.
     "In others, it is a matter of predestination..."
     "You mean they can't do anything to change their fate?" Dany asks.
     "Exactly, their life is simply spent waiting to go through one hole or the other."
     "Are you a religious man?"
     "Not particularly. I believed in goodness. I wasn't scared of god," Merhan says. "... until I got stuck here." Merhan would not tell Dany about his father's death. He doesn't want the comfort of someone who likely has no sense at all of his own mortality.     "Now you're thinking about those holes, huh?"
     "That I've already fallen through mine," Merhan says.
     Dany stares at the photos on the counter. He fishes in his backpack and draws out a cardboard box duct-taped in various places, with aluminum foil pasted to one face. Merhan inspects the slightly crushed cardboard box; he puts his eye up to the tiny hole and struggles to see what is inside, as if Dany has caged a cricket or a mouse for him. He sees the dark and feels his eyelashes brush against the box.
     Dany takes the camera and positions Merhan so he can take a picture of him. Slowly, he pulls the plastic from the film, warning Merhan to keep still. The minute of exposure passes slowly, Dany staring at Merhan to make sure he doesn't move and Merhan staring at the cardboard box, trying to project light from himself as he once tried to send love darts to Tahereh. After a minute is up, Dany puts his thumb over the pinhole as if he is snuffing a candle. Merhan releases the breath he has been holding and takes a swig of coffee.

* * *

Merhan prefers this photo--fuzzy within a circle of darkness, showing his eyes like two healing bruises--to the first ones Dany took. Looking at it, Merhan imagines that the distance between himself and his father can be traveled.
     I wait for the cloud-train to blow its whistle of jagged light.
The thought comforts him more than he expects.