The dream was a moment, as best as I can remember. It was at Pike Place Market in Seattle. It was late in the evening, around closing time. The cobblestone streets were wet but it had stopped raining, and the day’s crowd had thinned out to the market workers and a few last shoppers. The lights of the shops and stalls lit up the night, and I was saying my goodbyes after work, with a little bag of groceries in my hand. In the dream I was vaguely Italian, in the way that Iranians find themselves vaguely Italian when they try to find themselves in American stories. They were addressing me with a combination of an elder’s fondness, since I was a seventeen-year-old kid, and an equality, for having put in a day’s work just like them. I wasn’t sure where I was working, but it was within shouting distance of the flower-sellers, whose stall was a source of poetry for me, the way it served people coming with dreams of some kind or another. It was flowers and fish and fruit and the noise and rush of a day, ending in something soft and sorrowful, as much of a place that felt like it was tucking the city in for the night as any place could be. I was going home to write. The story would somehow contain a day and night at the market, even if it was not about them. It would contain the arc a young man traveled in, from the fresh morning when the city’s streets were clearest to the senses, to the sad night, when the whole world depended on a writer. The way that he said his goodbyes did not reveal just how tremblingly the world depended on him, except for a little quietude that was in it, knowing that his job was not done for the day, that in some ways it was just beginning. He would put the market and perhaps the whole city on his back, carrying them somewhere where every bit of holiness that anybody suspected they might have was confirmed, at least for today. It was what I was going to do anyway – try to prove to the world that I was right about its sorrow and its beauty, so I might as well try to do it purposefully, where the lights lit up the evening the most sorrowfully and beautifully.
That was the dream, and it wasn’t the dream itself that my father opposed, it was its presence in the place of college. He didn’t have anything against day or night or flowers or sorrow or beauty, but he had something very much forthe notion that a man did his learning in the places set up for learning. And a writer had to learn before he could write.
But who was going to write those stories if I didn’t do it, I thought. It was true that I didn’t know the first thing about what those stories actually were, whether they would be any good, and whether I had done enough in the city to write them, but I sure didn’t know who was going to do them if I didn’t, and it seemed better that I do them badly than nobody do them all. That seemed like a real waste.
So the only person who could move me away from the dream was someone who had those moments in him, those first brightly-lit moments of a night and the feeling that a man’s job was just starting then, and the feeling that that job did something bright to the world around him. Someone who could bring those moments into the discussion, and even though my father’s moments like that were not exactly like mine, they were real. His moments had been in Tehran, and when the city got dark, his job was just starting because of the way he and his friends would carve out watermelons and fill them with ink, and then go out to the city and write on its walls – Death to the Shah. They would know what night was, and so they got to know what day was, and they would wake up in the morning knowing that they had articulated something in the night that was true about the day. That was all I really wanted to do with a night.
But I was sixteen years old, and when somebody came to me who had those moments in him, who had them in abundance but did not flaunt them, and who was still trying to live them, it had a lot of power to it. And I put my moments up against his moments, the power of a deeply-felt possibility up against a deeply-appreciated reality, and I felt the evenness with which they were matched. At the moment of their hardest contact, nobody hated anybody else. It was almost as if we were both stepping back and watching the two forces press against each other ourselves. Those moments lived inside us, and even if they were coming out combatively, it was a pleasure to have them come out. And we could look out the window and feel ourselves wrestling over the night outside – the belief that its full mystery and wonder was accessible to a boy versus the notion that it held secrets so vast that a boy’s best chance was through some kind of regular study that let him meet the night with knowledge. He was the only man in the world I could wrestle with like that, and I had a great respect for him for that. I know you want to see what is out there, he was saying, but you ought to see armed. It is when you learn and use your learning for the benefit of the people that you can hear what the night is saying.
I knew that I could hear what the night was saying right now, but I was so happy to hear someone else acknowledging its power of speech that I let it go. He didn’t do it directly, but he did it in the way that he was not trying to end a conversation, a conversation between me and the night, but he believed that there was a smarter way to have it, a more thoughtful and planned-out way, a way that had some permanence to it. He believed in the conversation. He seemed to have something like it each night as he washed the dishes. It wasn’t the way I dreamed it but it was true. His conversation would reach back to when the night was a co-conspirator in a just cause, when he could be sure that it was firmly on his side. It felt lousy to be wrestling over the night with someone who was having a conversation with it like that. It would’ve been easier if I felt like my conversation with the night was the only one. Then I could’ve said, well of course nobody understands your wanting to be a writer – nobody else talks with the night like you do. But when a man felt comfortable in that conversation, it didn’t matter if he was washing the dishes or heading home to write after a day with the soul of the city. I was a boy who spoke with the night, and I wanted to be a man who spoke with it, but he was the only model I had for that, and I felt like if it was a wrong turn, it wouldn’t be too far of a wrong turn. I wouldn’t be turning my back on a belief in that conversation if I went to college. There was going to be a night to speak to there too anyway, wasn’t there?
I didn’t know how a man’s day affected the conversation he had with the night. It wasn’t the market itself, over a classroom. It was the city, because that was where the stories were. But I did go to a classroom, because the man telling me to go had a city in him when he did. He had it more than anyone I knew, and it didn’t matter that it was many years ago and it was a city I didn’t remember. I’d have had to toss that city aside in order to have my own one. That didn’t seem like any way to start having one. The idea was love. Anything worth having a city for and worth writing about it for came back to that. I couldn’t toss one city aside and expect the place I’d made in myself for another one to go unaffected. They were too closely related. All it took was one man to relate them. I finally felt like I would be losing a Tehran that was mine if I tossed aside his dream for me of college, because the Tehran in his heart was as close as I had it.
So it was five years later that I went to another city, San Francisco, and I went with my own dreams and without any thought that I might be interrupting my father’s conversations with the night. I felt like I was going somewhere where I might understand them a little, and I might even articulate them a little, because there were things in the city from the moment I got there that I finally understood as being part of those conversations. It was the face of man. It was the lost suffering face of man that I finally understood had taken all his strength to stay young about. He had seen that face in Tehran and I saw it in San Francisco, and that was what it meant to have Tehran and to have San Francisco. Sometimes at night I felt like those cities would speak to each other through one man who was trying to have both of them. They had a lot more in common than they had different. I had wanted to do it with Pike Place Market and the dream because I had felt sure that I could make Seattle big enough to include Tehran in my conversation. By the time I got to San Francisco, it was easy to do it. I could just remember the sight of my father smiling and waving goodbye as I was leaving. His smile was for every last living thing that I would see in the city, for every glimpse of the face of man, high and low, from every angle. And it was for an absolute faith in the appropriateness of my going to the city and seeking.
