We were looking at the world map, me and Jeddi.
“Look at Chile,” I said.
“I love Chile.”
“Me too.”
“It doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”
“Nope. It’s going to be as long and skinny as it wants to be.”
It was raining outside, and I felt like the map was all we needed.
“I’m worried about Lesotho,” Jeddi said. “I don’t like to see a country surrounded by a whole other country. I’ve never liked that.”
“You think it’s dirty?”
“All borders are dirty. That’s what my dad says. Look at India and Pakistan.”
I looked.
“Why do you think it’s all squiggly like that?” he said.
“Why?”
“Because nobody could agree on how it should go.”
I looked at all the places where the lines were squiggly. There must have been a lot of places where nobody could agree on how it should go.
“Well, I can’t imagine how it would be if every place was a perfect square or rectangle. I like their shapes.”
“Me too.”
We had hoped to get a few guys together to play football at the school field, but it was raining too hard. There was a time for mud football, but everybody had to be in the right mood. The best mud football was when you were already playing when it started to rain, and you just kept going rather than quit.
“I’d like to live in Togo,” Jeddi said.
“Why?”
“Look how small it is. I might know everybody there.”
I laughed. It did look like that on the map.
“I’d like to live in Cuba,” I said. “It looks like a shark coming out of the water.”
“It’s swimming to Mexico.”
“Yup. It’s almost there. It’s more like a knife than a shark.”
“It’s more like a pen. An old-fashioned pen that has a feather on the end of it.”
I looked the other way, across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. I knew it was a long way to go, but it seemed like nothing.
“What about the Canary Islands?” I said.
“What about them?”
“You think you’ll ever go there?”
“Yes. If they have canaries. I might be studying them.”
“They look like they would have canaries. They look like they’d be a very nice place to be a canary.”
“If I was a canary, I would fly from Morocco to Spain.”
It looked beautiful. I’d heard something about cliffs or rocks over there, and I pictured a canary flying over them, looking down. A lot of places looked beautiful on a map. They looked like mine too. I had been born in Iran and then gone to England and then come to America, and Jeddi’s family had come from India to America, so those were special places on a map for us, but there was something about all the places that made them seem like ours, like they were all waiting for us to come there, and they would be ours even if we didn’t.
The world seemed small too, still full of all kinds of countries and languages and all that, but in a way that was manageable, in a way that a boy could think he was on his way to having a pretty good handle over.
I wished the world was like a map. I wished our school could be more like a map. There weren’t any places on a map that said, don’t come here, or, stay over there. There were borders, but the countries couldn’t have their different bright colors without borders. A map just said, here’s how it is and you do the rest.
“Here’s where my dad was born,” Jeddi said, pointing to Hyderabad.
“Here’s where my dad was born,” I said, pointing to Ardebil.
They weren’t very close, but they were sure a lot closer to each other than to Seattle. I felt proud of my father for being a man all the way over there and being a man here. He had traveled over all that distance really knowing what it was to move across the map. My own travels had been before I knew what was going on. But I still liked to know that I had made them.
We looked at the cities we had been to, but it wasn’t as fun as talking about the places we would like to go. A map was better for those places, because you already had a picture in your mind for the places you’d been.
We looked at the possibility of living in Madagascar, Malaysia, Java, the Yukon, Peru, Antartica, Fiji, Botswana, Finland, Slovakia, Ireland, Portugal, Namibia, Cambodia, New Zealand, and France.
I would’ve taken any of them. I would’ve taken any of them even just for a day. But then I started thinking about it.
“What about the people?” I said.
“They’ll be nice. They’ll be glad to see us.”
“You can’t tell that from a map.”
“Sure you can,” Jeddi said, and I felt bad for bringing it up because youcould tell that from a map, but not in a way that either of us could explain.
“Look at Venezuela,” he said. “You don’t think they want us to see what it’s like down there? Look at them.” I looked. “They’re saying, ‘Hey everybody, we’re Venezuela.”
“Well, they are Venezuela.”
“You don’t think a guy in Venezuela wants to know about a guy in Turkey? You don’t think they have maps in Venezuela?”
I couldn’t argue with that. I was sure they had maps in Venezuela. I would’ve liked to see the maps they had there. I felt really good to think that they might be looking at a map there right now.
“They might be looking at a map and wondering about Seattle,” I said.
“Yup.”
We found Seattle on the map and it looked like a pretty good place. You couldn’t see everything that was happening there of course, you couldn’t see our neighborhood and our school and the places we liked going to like the field and the places we didn’t like going to like the mall, but you could still see Seattle and think, all right, there it is. It was a start.
You couldn’t see it on the map, but it would’ve been a great day in Seattle if it hadn’t been raining because we would’ve been playing football, but even with the rain, it felt like we were doing the next best thing, it really felt like we were doing the next best thing, which was looking around on a world map and finding the place where we would’ve been playing football some time.
