STORY

The boy had been in America for a year, but still every time he saw a dog being walked on a leash by his master, he thought, 'How do you stand for this? How come you don't rise up? Nobody deserves to be pulled around by a leash.' He would look at the dog and the dog wouldn't seem to care. But from his bed at night he would hear the neighborhood dogs barking and it seemed like they were calling for their freedom.

He didn't know about this place, where tyranny was not as close at hand as it had been in Iran, but the tyranny that was there seemed to go unseen. Nobody seemed to write things on the walls about it. Nobody seemed to sell any secret newspapers about it. But there had to be some kind of secret tyranny going on in a place where people could freely walk around pulling somebody by the neck. He had seen men being beaten in the middle of crowded streets. He had seen elders yelling at teenagers outside of mosques. But those were quick, sudden movements. They didn't last long because the people doing the beating or yelling were always a little bit ashamed, it seemed. But the people walking with their dogs seemed perfectly relaxed about it. They didn't even look like they'd had to struggle to get the leashes on the dogs.

It was 1980, and the revolution had gotten into every part of him, through and through. He was far away from it though, so all he knew about it was that it was the end of something he did not like. The revolution was a sunny day, it was a goal in soccer, it was vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. It was all those things, but it was also something that he was carrying by himself when he went outside. So he looked for it where he could find it, and dogs were what everybody in America seemed to have.

He wrote letters to his cousin in Iran, who said that the revolution was not turning out as good as they'd thought. The boy did not tell him about the dogs. It seemed a little foolish when he wrote to his cousin. But the next time he saw a dog on a leash, he felt sure that that was part of the problem.

All he wanted was for them to see what they could be, out on their own. He bet that it would be something great. He loved animals, but the thing he loved most about them was everything he didn't know about them, everything he had never seen them doing. Once a dog did a trick, or once a dolphin jumped out of a pool like at the amusement park his uncle had taken him to, it wasn't love. It was interesting, but it wasn't love.

The girl next door had a dog that was kept in the backyard, and the boy liked to watch it from the window of his bedroom. It had a little bit of freedom back there. In Iran there had been neighborhood dogs, and some of them had been very skinny, but they'd had a chance to develop personalities. The girl next door treated her dog like he had a personality, but it was the kind of personality that was meant for the times when she was in a good mood. The boy thought that the dog deserved to feel like he was part of the world during every mood. That was how it looked from his window.

One day he was coming home from the store and he saw the gate next door opened a crack. He looked in and saw the dog sitting on the grass.

"Hello, Harry," the boy said. "This is what the world looks like over here." He opened the door wide and gave a view of the school across the street and the little park and the sun just beginning to set. It was pretty nice.

The dog lifted its head but didn't move.

He was in America now, and the dog was not going to go off exploring the city by itself and then come back at night and look for food. The boy missed Iran, never mind the revolution and whether or not it had gone the way they thought it would go.

The girl came out of her house. "Hi Kamran," she said.

"Hi."

"You can pet him if you want."

The boy walked up to the dog and stroked its back.

"You are a nice dog, aren't you?" the girl said.

The boy did not know if it was a nice dog or not. He did not bite his hand, so he guessed maybe that was a good enough start.

"Do you have any pets?" she said.

"No," he said. Then he remembered - "At New Year's time, we buy goldfish."

"Fish are boring," the girl said.

They are fish, the boy thought.

"Do you like dogs?" she said.

He wasn't sure how to answer. He liked them as much as he liked fish. At school his teacher had asked him what his favorite animal was and he didn't know what to say so he had said whales, because that was another animal that people liked very much in America.

"Yes," he said.

"I love them," she said. She scratched the dog's head. Maybe they really liked this life, he thought. Maybe the dog didn't want to see the world outside the gate. Maybe the world looked the same when they took him out for a walk on his leash. There were dogs in Iran who looked like they had stories to tell after he wouldn't see them for a few days. But maybe most of it wasn't a happy story.

They liked being happy a lot in America. Maybe they didn't need a revolution because the people were already good at being happy. But it wasn't the same kind of happiness that he'd seen on T.V. in the streets of Iran. They didn't rush out into the streets with it. They stayed home with it mostly, he guessed.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" the girl said. "I want to be an animal doctor."

"I want to be a man who fights against kings."

"What kings?"

"Any kings."

"Why?"

"I don't like them."

"What about good kings?"

"There are no good kings."

"Yes there are."

The boy did not speak. It didn't make sense to him - if somebody was going to be good, why would they want to be a king? All a king wanted to do was to tell other people what to do.

"If I meet a good king, I won't fight him." He hoped she realized how generous he was being.

"Good," she said. She scratched the dog's belly and it turned over.

The boy didn't think he could ever be someone who could scratch a dog's belly while they talked about kings. He wondered if the girl actually knew about any good kings, because that was very big news if it was true. It wasn't the kind of thing someone could just say while they scratched their dog's belly.

At home he asked his older brother if there were any good kings.

"Not in Iran," his brother said.

That was true. He felt it. He had lived in Iran and America, and he wasn't sure what he felt about America except that he didn't like seeing so many dogs on leashes, but he felt sure his brother was right about no good kings being in Iran.

It was a while later that he told the girl about it.

"What?" she said. She didn't remember it. It felt worse that she didn't remember it than that he had believed her at first. He wanted to know what they could talk about that she would remember if it wasn't that.

Whatever it was, it wasn't that he wanted to start talking about it, he just wanted to know. He wanted to know about where he was because he was here. He knew that there was a lot that was different. He knew that he liked dogs a lot more than he liked dogs on leashes. He liked seeing Harry from his window more than he liked going there and petting him. He liked the way they were equals then, like Harry might look up and see him and have his own thoughts about the life of a boy. He would look like a dog in Iran then, and then none of what was happening there, a revolution and even a revolution that wasn't going the way they thought it would, would seem as far away.