It was the day for Javeed to register for school, a week before classes began. Martin drove Mahnoosh to the shop early and the three of them sat in the back room unpacking boxes. Just the smell of new books always made Martin feel refreshed and optimistic; Mahnoosh was less romantic, and suggested that this was all down to traces of glue. Javeed’s task was to crush the biofoam packing chips by hammering them relentlessly with his fists, and to complain at length about shipments that were cushioned with shredded newsprint or plastic bags full of air.
When it was time to leave, Javeed embraced his mother tightly, clinging for a few moments longer than usual. ‘Azizam, azizam,’ she murmured reassuringly, pressing her face against his hair. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll love school.’
‘I know,’ Javeed replied cheerfully.
Martin kissed her. ‘See you this afternoon.’
There was a long queue at the school; they had to fill in a form and then wait to have it processed. Martin didn’t understand why they couldn’t have done the whole thing online; he’d renewed his driver’s licence a month before without leaving home, thanks to a seamless process involving facial biometrics and a gadget that read the RFID tag in the card. Still, it was good for his son to see the school from the inside at least once before starting classes. When Javeed needed to use the toilet the woman ahead of them offered to keep their place in the queue, but Martin sent him on the small adventure of getting there and back by himself.
In the office, an administrative assistant sighted their collection of identifying documents and perused the registration form, ready to pass it through a scanner.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Seymour,’ she said, ‘you haven’t written anything for the child’s religion.’ She raised her pen, ready to correct this omission.
‘He has no religion,’ Martin replied. ‘If the computer won’t accept a blank, you’ll have to write “atheist”.’ He saw a flicker of panic cross her face, but she recovered her composure rapidly.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I think you misunderstood the question. What it means is the religion of his paternal grandfather…’ She gave Martin a frank, appraising look, then decided it was definitely worth adding, ‘or great-grandfather, or so on, as far back as necessary.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Martin had no wish to blow the matter out of proportion, but it would be good to know whether there was an official policy defining atheists out of existence, or whether he was just facing a flustered individual who didn’t know how to handle this minor anomaly.
‘When we ask if children are Kurdish or Arabs,’ the woman replied, ‘the fact is, they are all Iranians, and we simply mean the ethnic group of their ancestors. So it is completely logical and consistent to apply the same reasoning to the question of religion.’
Martin had to admire the ingenuity of her argument. Most likely this woman had no discretion in the matter and she was simply trying to spare them all from the bureaucratic hell that would arise if the computer rejected their registration.
‘My son’s paternal ancestors were Christian,’ Martin conceded. The woman looked relieved and recorded his answer on the form.
‘Which denomination?’ she asked.
Martin honestly had no idea. ‘The Church of Saint Coltrane,’ he said. The woman started writing; when she paused halfway through he added helpfully, ‘Kaf, vav, lam-’ She looked up. ‘I know how to spell Coltrane. I was just wondering whether you meant John or Robbie.’
As they walked away from the office across a small playground, Javeed asked, ‘Why did you make that lady angry?’
‘I don’t think she was angry,’ Martin replied. ‘We just had to decide the right thing to put on the form.’
Javeed looked sceptical, but he let it drop. ‘Where’s my grandfather?’
‘My father died before you were born. And my mother too.’ Javeed flinched a little; Martin had told him this many times, but it was starting to cut a little deeper. ‘They had very happy lives, so you shouldn’t be sad for them.’
‘What about Mama’s father?’
Martin steeled himself. ‘He’s still alive. He’s living in Tehran.’ Again, this was old news, but each repetition carried new weight.
‘So why don’t we visit him?’
‘Because he’s angry with Mama.’
Javeed pulled a face, part incredulous, part anxious. ‘Still?’
‘Yes.’
‘And her mama? She’s still angry too?’
‘Yes.’ That seemed to sting even more. Martin put a hand on Javeed’s shoulder. ‘I know, it’s hard not to be sad about that, but Mama’s very brave about it, so we should be too.’
Javeed turned to Martin, suddenly tearful. ‘If you get angry with me, will you leave me alone?’
‘Ooh, ooh, ooh.’ Martin lifted him up and held him in his arms. ‘That’s never going to happen. Never ever.’ Martin carried him all the way to the car, ignoring the growing twinges in his back. ‘Come on, no more crying. Remember what I promised you today? We’re going to Uncle Omar’s shop.’
Javeed recovered instantly, all thoughts of abandonment forgotten.
As they walked from the car together Javeed tried to break free and run ahead, but Martin kept an iron grip on his hand. Ahead of them, three motorbike riders were pushing their way through the pedestrian throng, and though they never had a chance to build up much speed they were easily arrogant and inattentive enough to knock over a small child. As they passed, forcing Martin aside and almost into the gutter, he drew Javeed close to him and resisted the urge to stick his elbow into the face of the nearest rider.
Once the shop door had closed behind them he relaxed, and Javeed ran to embrace Omar gleefully. Then Omar’s son Farshid started wrestling with him, lifting him over his head and turning him upside down. Javeed screamed with delight.
Martin greeted Omar. ‘Javeed just registered for school,’ he explained.
‘Ah, so you’re a big man now? Big scholar? Big sportsman?’ Omar threw some punches at Javeed’s upside-down torso; Javeed flailed back at him, emitting strange martial arts noises from one of his computer games. Omar turned back to Martin. ‘How’s business, Martin jan?’
‘Not bad. You know Iranians; they’re never going to stop buying books. How’s the shop?’ Martin could only see half-a-dozen customers browsing the aisles, but whenever he’d been here at lunchtime the place was packed.
Omar gestured proudly at a new display of cyber-ketabha: two-hundred-sheet e-paper bundles with the look and feel of paper-backs. Each device could store a million volumes’ worth of text. ‘I already sold sixty of these this month.’ He beamed. ‘You’re right, Iranians love books.’
Martin feigned indifference and went to flip through a bin of old Blu-rays, marked down to clear. He lifted a disc out and held it up. ‘You know Vin Diesel’s making a comeback?’
‘Really?’
‘It’s called The Chronicles of Kulos. They’re shooting it right now in the Negev Desert.’
Javeed had managed to get free of Farshid and was now looking around the shop with a determined frown. ‘I promised he could choose something for less than fifty thousand tomans,’ Martin said. Omar scowled, offended. ‘Let him choose anything! You don’t have to pay.’ Martin scowled back; he didn’t doubt Omar’s generosity, but he was struggling to instil some sense of restraint in Javeed.
Javeed was staring at a big cardboard pop-out display of various spin-offs from the
LOLCat Diaries movie. The original lame tagline, ‘I CAN HAZ BLOKBUSTR?’ had been ingeniously amended by the insertion of a caret mark pointing to the word ‘GAME’; layered in front of this was a cut-out image of a dishevelled cat with its limbs splayed awkwardly, one paw on a joystick, bearing the caption ‘IM IN UR CONSOLE MESSING WITH UR WORLD’. The distributors hadn’t bothered trying to translate any of this; half the movie’s dialogue had been dubbed into Farsi, but the rest had been left as a kind of anti-lesson in English. Martin watched with a sense of resignation; having caved in once over the movie itself, he now had nobody but himself to blame.
But Javeed didn’t turn to him and inquire tweely, ‘I can haz LOLCat game?’ Apparently the attractions of a contrivedly cute animal speaking a dialect of TXT from the formative years of the current generation of DreamWorks executives had a limited half-life, even for a five-year-old. Instead Javeed announced, ‘I want to try Zendegi!’
To his credit, Omar said nothing. Martin thought it over. He’d never been in Zendegi-ye-Behtar himself, but he’d read reviews; there was some good content, and plenty that was suited to children. There was Hollywood schlock too, if you really wanted it, but it wasn’t compulsory.
He said, ‘If Uncle Omar’s got time, and there are spare machines for both of us. If not, we’ll come back another day. All right?’
Javeed caught the warning tone in the last sentence. He replied placidly, ‘Yes, Baba.’ Then he stood very still and waited for the verdict.
Omar led them upstairs. Eight of the spherical VR rigs – known rather grandly as ghal’eha, or castles – were inflated and opaque, but two were unoccupied. Martin found it a little creepy that the things blacked out when in use; it gave them an air of private peepshow booths, however innocent the actual content being conveyed. But then, it would have been even creepier to be standing inside one, blind to the world, knowing that anyone in the room outside could observe your every move. As they walked between the rows of occupied castles, Martin glanced down and saw a familiar logo on the base of one machine: a triangle with the letter S for each edge. How could he not love anything from Slightly Smart Systems?
First they had to sign on for the free trial; Omar took them to a desktop computer in a corner of the room and went through the formalities. Martin chose English and Farsi, and gave their real first names as identifiers; there was no requirement to supply a unique nickname.
‘You want to look like yourself?’ Omar inquired. ‘Or somebody else?’
Martin hesitated. Some protective instinct made him wonder if he should disguise Javeed’s appearance, but from what he’d heard that didn’t seem to be the usual practice. Omar showed Javeed a few predefined icons – including the dreaded LOLCat – but Javeed just became confused and indecisive. Martin said, ‘It’s okay, we can go in as ourselves.’ If they were safe together on a public street, why would they need masks to be safe in Zendegi?
Omar had them take turns standing on a mark painted on the floor in front of the desktop; the cameras that snapped them from multiple angles were too small for Martin to see. They had to pronounce a dozen different syllables, then make faces expressing fear, surprise, joy, mirth, sadness and disgust. Javeed hammed it up mercilessly, but this wasn’t like the wind changing and leaving you stuck with your ugliest countenance; the software could interpolate between the recorded extremes, rather than just spitting them back out at onlookers, unchanged.
Omar fitted them for gloves and wraparound goggles; there were small earphones built in, along with microphones and motion sensors. Then, with the goggles’ screens flipped up, they walked to the centres of their respective castles, which looked like huge sheets of bubblewrap draped over the circular bases.
Martin turned to Javeed. ‘Khubi, pesaram?’
‘Balé.’
Omar said, ‘Don’t worry about the menu system, you can learn that later. If you want to get out in a hurry, just go like this.’ He made an emphatic thumbs-down gesture.
Martin said, ‘Thanks.’
Omar grinned. ‘Enjoy the ride.’
There was a faint hissing sound as the castles inflated around them, the limp plastic sheets rising up into a fishbowl shape; the walls had not yet turned opaque, but they already blurred the view. Martin raised a hand to Javeed while they still had clear sight of each other. ‘See you in Zendegi!’
Javeed looked slightly nervous now, but he called back confidently, ‘Hatman.’
When the raised circular rim was about as high as Martin’s shoulders the aperture began to shrink as it ascended; a few seconds later he was inside an unbroken sphere about three metres wide. Near the edge of the circular base there was a thick hoop sitting over the sphere’s translucent plastic; Martin guessed the hoop was held in place magnetically, so the plastic could slide freely beneath it, driven by rollers in the base. So far, the enclosure felt light and airy rather than claustrophobic; the vanished traffic sounds confirmed that the thing was soundproof, but the material wasn’t airtight – they weren’t relying on hidden machinery to keep them from suffocating, and a power failure would not be a big deal. Martin realised belatedly that ‘castle’ probably meant something far less pompous than he’d imagined; the devices were actually very close kin to children’s inflatable castles.
A woman’s voice, speaking in Farsi, asked them to flip down their goggles. Martin complied – and saw an image that he could barely distinguish from the real translucent sphere he’d been looking at an instant before. He held up a hand in front of his face; the gloves were gone, and he could see the lines on his palms. If some crease in his shirt sleeve was improperly rendered he would never have guessed – and as soon as he wiggled his fingers and saw the correct response, the sense that he was occupying the image before him became unshakeable.
The sphere surrounding him began to expand, the floor spreading out and flattening as the wall receded. Then a small, circular aperture appeared in the wall, connecting Martin’s bubble to another one beside him; within seconds, the structures had merged and he and Javeed were together inside a single dome.
Javeed laughed and ran towards him; Martin felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. The icon approaching him wasn’t perfect – its gait was a little stilted, its facial expression not quite natural – but Martin felt more inclined to rub his eyes, as if his vision might be blurred from dust or tiredness, than to perceive the flaws as external. If not for the fact that his son appeared before him without goggles, he would have sworn that the whole thing was being done with cameras hidden inside the spheres. Well, no doubt there were such cameras, helping, but the overall feat went far beyond any kind of simple video link.
He took a few steps towards Javeed, and the knowledge that they were both stuck inside their separate treadmills – the spheres turning around them as they walked, like omni-directional hamster wheels – receded into irrelevance. Javeed reached out and grabbed at Martin’s legs, then showed an astonished face very close to the most extreme he’d recorded; Martin felt nothing, of course, and saw his son’s hands not quite making contact. Curious, he tried to lay a hand on Javeed’s shoulder; just before he reached the fabric of the shirt the haptic glove produced a strange sensation, as if he were pushing through treacle. But the glove could exert no force to stop him, and when he persisted he understood why Javeed had looked so startled. As his real hand descended past the point where it would have made contact, his icon refused to portray his true motion; the result was a sudden, alarming conviction that his body was reeling forward uncontrollably. Martin retreated, and exchanged a knowing smile with Javeed. The lack of physical restraints made it easy to puncture the illusion if you wanted to, but that would defeat the whole point of being here.
Javeed held up his hand. Martin reached down and took it; the glove gave him the sensation of contact with skin, and its cues helped him avoid closing his hand too tightly – even though he was really holding nothing but air. And though there was no machinery to bear any of the weight of his son’s arm, whatever Javeed was feeling seemed to prompt him to make the extra effort to keep his arm raised. It was a light, tentative grip that they shared, but unlike their other attempts at contact it was close enough to the real thing to be compelling.
‘What now?’ Martin wondered. As he spoke, the bright wall of the dome began to take on patches of definite colour, as if the translucent plastic was being pressed very close to something. Or rather, close to many things: the patches of colour sharpened into dozens of separate windows, looking out onto different scenes.
‘Shall we go and take a look?’
Javeed said, ‘Yes,’ but he did not rush ahead. He kept his hand in Martin’s as they crossed the dome, both of them working to maintain the delicate link.
The windows were tall and thin, and low enough for Javeed to see through easily. The first one they reached showed a grassy field at the edge of a forest. Children were running excitedly across the field, all of them boys, most at least a couple of years older than Javeed. The longer the two of them gazed at the window, the more sound from beyond flowed through, but even as the boys’ shouting grew stronger, their words remained indistinct. With a shock, Martin realised that some of them were carrying spears. What was this, Lord of the Flies?
A winged tiger swooped down over the field, snarling and snatching at the children. Martin turned to Javeed. ‘I don’t think this is for us.’ It was one thing to watch your character chased by a stylised monster in a console game, something else to flee breathlessly across the grass with a clawed beast bearing down on you.
Javeed looked hesitant rather than disappointed, as if wondering whether to argue just for the sake of it, but then he replied, ‘Okay.’
They moved on to the next window. Some hundred metres away across barren terrain sat a low, sprawling building, its walls decorated with colourful abstract mosaics. There was no one in sight, and all Martin could hear was a faint buzz of insects. As he peered through the window, a caption appeared on the glass in both Farsi and English: The Labyrinth. Javeed tried sounding out the word, but both versions defeated him.
Martin told him what it meant, and Javeed said excitedly, ‘This one!’
‘Are you sure?’ Martin wished Omar had told him more about navigating the system; presumably there was some way to discover in advance whether there was a Minotaur lurking in this maze. ‘You think it will be fun?’
‘Yes,’ Javeed insisted; he was growing impatient. ‘If we don’t like it, we can just use our thumbs.’
‘That’s true. So how do we get out?’
Javeed slipped free of Martin’s hand and placed both of his palms against the window. There was a sharp click, as if he’d released the catch on some mechanism, and the window swung up like a garage door; at the same time, the section of the wall below it slid down until it was flush with the floor.
‘You first,’ Martin said. Javeed walked straight through the narrow opening; Martin felt compelled to turn and go through sideways. He was glad it was already becoming second nature to treat every obstacle here as if it were real. There wouldn’t be much point entering a maze on any other terms.
The bare grey rock between the dome and the maze sloped gently downwards; Martin was impressed that the platforms beneath their feet could tilt to accommodate this effect so seamlessly, and without the delays and noises he remembered from clunky sloping treadmills in the gym. There were no loose rocks or sudden shifts in height; at ground level at least, the landscape promised nothing that the technology couldn’t deliver. Martin looked up at the clear blue sky and felt a surge of elation – followed immediately by a pang of unease. If Javeed got hooked on this at least he wouldn’t end up as a couch potato. But then, if Zendegi wasn’t even bad for his health, what excuse would there be to lure him away from it in favour of real adventures beneath real skies?
As they approached the maze, Martin saw how finely detailed the mosaic was, with blue and gold tiles as richly hued as any that adorned the mosques of Esfahan. The pattern was a complex system of intersecting grids and stars twisting across the surface. They walked around the building until they came to an opening in the wall – or rather, the mouth of a long passage whose own walls merged with the outer one. The passage was open to the sky; because the walls were so high, Martin hadn’t realised before that the ‘building’ had no roof. This was an outdoor maze, not a claustrophobic warren of tunnels.
There were words set into the tiles near the entrance: ‘Find the fountain, and change the world,’ he read. He laughed. ‘Okay, shall we go in and look for the fountain?’
‘Yes!’
‘Stay close to me. If we get separated, or there’s anything happening you don’t like, just give it the thumbs-down.’
‘Okay, Baba.’
Martin searched Javeed’s face for any hint of anxiety, then caught himself wondering what kind of subtleties might be lost along the way in the imperfect process that was painting the image in front of him. But his son’s voice was being conveyed to him unchanged, and he’d sounded confident enough. ‘Okay, pesaram.’
They walked side by side into the maze. The sun was high enough and the passage wide, to keep the walls around them from plunging them into gloom. Martin kept glancing at the lush patterns of the mosaic, wondering if they might encode some kind of clue. If they did, it wasn’t obvious, but at least there were no images of bull-headed monsters creeping into the design.
They came to their first junction. ‘Raast ya chap?’ Martin asked.
‘We should toss a coin,’ Javeed suggested.
‘Hmm. I wonder…’ Martin reached into his pocket; the gloves interfered with his sense of touch, but from the sensation against his leg through the material of his trousers he was fairly sure he’d gripped a thousand-rial coin. But when he took his hand out, Zendegi was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the coin’s existence. ‘No. Maybe next time we can find out how to get some local currency.’ He put the invisible coin back in his pocket carefully, not wanting to drop it into the sphere and trip up on it later.
‘Raast,’ Javeed decided. They turned to the right.
After a while Martin heard children’s voices, shouts echoing between the tiles from somewhere not too far away. ‘Hey! So we’re not alone.’
‘What if they get to the fountain before us?’ Javeed’s icon managed a near-perfect it’s the end of the world if I don’t win look.
‘I don’t know. Do you want to go faster?’
Javeed nodded enthusiastically. Martin started jogging, and Javeed ran to keep up with him. It was hard to accept, viscerally, that there could be no grazed knees from the rocky ground here – let alone the kind of tearful collisions with the walls that were almost guaranteed in the real world, when Javeed had friends over and they chased each other from room to room. Martin didn’t want to keep fretting about the downside, but he wondered if the mismatch between visual cues and physical consequences might stunt a child’s instincts for dealing with obstacles in real life.
The passage turned left, offering them no choice this time. Martin heard footsteps and saw a child darting across an intersection twenty metres or so ahead of them; he or she was gone in an instant, but the voices were closer, and it sounded as if the child was a straggler chasing a group of friends. Javeed pumped his limbs harder, determined to catch up; Martin felt his own pace switch from effortless to distinctly sweaty.
They reached the intersection and turned right, the way the child had gone, taking them into a short passage that ended in a T-junction. Martin heard laughter that sounded very close, but the echoes made it impossible to judge the direction.
‘Which way?’ Javeed fretted.
‘Right,’ Martin said firmly, for no particular reason. When they’d first gone in, he’d had some vague idea of using the keep-the-wall-to-your-right rule, which at least had the virtue that you wouldn’t end up going around in circles. But he was beginning to suspect that their free trial would run out long before they solved the maze, whatever strategy they adopted.
They took the right turn, then the passage forced them left, then left again… into a cul-de-sac. Javeed stood at the wall, scowling; the set of his mouth wasn’t quite authentic, but Martin recognised the signs of an incipient tantrum immediately. He leant down beside him. ‘This is what mazes are for,’ he said gently, ‘to get lost in, to make mistakes.’
‘You said “right”!’ Javeed replied accusingly, utterly oblivious to Martin’s suggestion that this setback could be acceptable, let alone desirable.
‘So we’ll go back to the same place and turn left.’
‘But we’ve lost them now!’
‘Maybe. We’ll see.’
Javeed followed him out of the dead end, sulkily refusing to be hurried. Martin examined the mosaics around them, trying to commit the pattern to memory just in case there was some kind of visual cue marking the routes that led nowhere.
Back at the T-junction, they continued down the passage into the unexplored arm. It wasn’t long before Javeed’s disappointment had faded and they were running again – gloriously confused, if not quite lost. Martin kept hearing shouts and snatches of laughter, always children’s voices. The sound of these elusive playmates made him want to whisper to Javeed, ‘Do you think there are ghosts here? Maybe this is a haunted maze, full of children who never found their way out.’ But he struggled to recall how old he’d been himself before such a notion would have elicited an enjoyable thrill, rather than sheer terror. It seemed wiser to err on the side of caution.
Then they took a turn and suddenly the children were all around them, coming in the opposite direction and almost colliding with them. There were more than a dozen, as real and unghostly as he and Javeed were to each other. ‘Not that way!’ one of the girls scolded Javeed in Farsi. A boy added, ‘We went that way already, it’s a dead end.’
Javeed looked confused for a moment, but then he seemed to bond with the group in an instant, with no need for any adult nonsense: no exchange of names, no empty pleasantries, just a discussion of the matter at hand. The children barely acknowledged Martin, but that felt more like a kind of politeness than a deliberate rebuff; they simply weren’t presuming that an adult stranger would want to speak with them, let alone be a part of their game. Martin wasn’t comfortable letting Javeed out of his sight, though, so he tagged along beside him as the mob headed back down the passage, and some of the children attempted to explain to Javeed where they’d been so far and where they thought they were going. Martin couldn’t work out if they’d been performing a systematic sweep of the maze, but he wasn’t about to intrude with his own questions or advice. And Javeed was reconciled to the fact that he wasn’t going to win any race now; it was enough that he’d been accepted into this group.
Martin let the boisterous chatter flow past him, just keeping an eye on Javeed and checking the mosaics for clues. When the group hit another dead end there were complaints and recriminations, but there was too much collective energy for anyone to start sulking, and no opportunity for disenchantment to lead to blows. Ten minutes later, Martin noticed a distinctive crowding of the mosaic’s features that he’d seen twice before. Sure enough, a few turns later they reached yet another cul-de-sac. If he’d been alone with Javeed he would have stopped and explained the discovery to him, but as things stood he didn’t want to interfere with the children’s own plans. As they retraced their steps, Javeed chatted happily with the girl beside him, sharing his somewhat optimistic vision of school. ‘And I’m going to build a model plane, and then I’m going to build a car-’
‘You can build a plane in Zendegi,’ she interjected, ‘big enough to fly in.’
Javeed was speechless.
Martin could see the pattern on the walls growing simpler and more spacious, until they came to a junction where it was almost pared down to a sequence of eight-pointed stars sitting alone in a square grid; all the delicate complications and adornments had been stripped away. The children walked right past this signpost – but five minutes later their own haphazard strategy brought them back to it.
When they reached the end of the passage and took one last obligatory turn, they found themselves in a courtyard in the centre of the maze. Directly in front of them was an octagonal fountain carved from white stone.
Shouts of triumph filled the courtyard. Javeed was ecstatic, jumping up and down with delight; Martin wished he could have lofted him into the air, though the way his back had been lately he probably should be grateful that it was impossible here.
‘I want to throw a coin in the fountain!’ Javeed said. Martin held out his empty hands. ‘They don’t take our money here, remember?’ No doubt that would be easily fixed once they had Martin’s credit card details.
Some of the children were gathering around the fountain, searching for a hidden reward. Martin and Javeed joined them, but Martin was curious about more basic things than game-loot. Zendegi wouldn’t play along if you insisted on trying to occupy the same location as a solid object, but what about water?
Martin said, ‘Try and splash me. See what happens.’
Javeed hesitated, probably recalling the dose of vertigo he’d received when he’d tried to grab hold of Martin’s legs. But he summoned up his courage and reached into the pool of water at the fountain’s edge. From his expression it was clear that he felt something, but before Martin could ask him to describe the sensation, Javeed had taken him at his word and swatted some of the stuff in his direction. Martin blinked at the stream of droplets, unable to shut off the protective instinct. When he opened his eyes he put a hand to his cheek and felt moisture on his fingertips. Weirdly, he couldn’t decide how convincing the sensation was in itself; the context told him what it should have meant, and his brain just accepted the whole package.
Javeed laughed and cupped some more water threateningly in his hand, but at the last moment he spared Martin and tipped it onto the ground instead. As it puddled on the grey stone, the hard surface fissured and disintegrated with a steamy hiss, then green blades of grass thrust their way up through the powdery residue.
Javeed shouted wildly, and soon all the children were joining in, scooping up water and dropping it onto the stone. Martin didn’t want to rob the kids of any of their fun – and he felt a little self-conscious, too – but after a while he couldn’t resist; he cupped some water in his hands and carried it to one of the few remaining patches that had escaped the transformation. That grass and stone felt the same beneath his shoes didn’t really undermine his suspension of disbelief, and when he squatted down to check the texture with his hands it was downright eerie: when his fingertip made contact with a blade of grass, the sensation of gentle springiness created by the haptic glove’s calibrated tickle was more than enough to bolster the illusion.
That was enough for him; Martin stood aside and watched as the children hunted for the spots they’d missed. Javeed kept crossing the grass around the fountain with handfuls of water that leaked through his fingers before he could find any stone to transmute, but he wasn’t growing frustrated; everyone was having much too good a time.
A blue-and-gold butterfly hovered beside the fountain. Martin turned towards the sudden shouts of excitement and saw a whole swarm of them peeling off the courtyard’s wall. Someone had splashed the wall, and unlike the change that had been wrought on the ground, this appeared to be self-sustaining; as the tiles of the mosaic became the scales of butterfly wings, their neighbours needed no extra dose of water to follow in their wake.
Javeed was open-mouthed with astonishment now; his face looked as if it had been pushed beyond the already overblown exemplar he’d given Omar. The walls of the courtyard disappeared beneath a tornado of butterflies that stretched up into the air; a few were flying across the grass, but the swarm as a whole kept its distance, preventing the spectacle from becoming oppressive. The children were shouting and squealing, but nobody seemed frightened. Martin went and stood beside Javeed and they watched in silence as the vortex of change ate its way through the walls of the courtyard and began devouring the surrounding maze. He looked up, afraid that the insects might block out the sky, but the funnel was broadening as it grew, the butterflies dispersing as they ascended.
As the maze disintegrated, the grass of the courtyard spread out to take its place; like a swarm of locusts in reverse the butterflies were transforming the once barren ground into lush greenery. But even more strikingly, the advancing horde left something intact: people. Apparently not everyone had managed to reach the courtyard, and now the stragglers were being liberated from the confusion of the maze. Martin saw one group of children leaping into the air, trying to catch the blue-and-golden insects.
When the butterflies reached the edges of the maze they flew off across the rocky desert, leaving behind nothing but an octagonal oasis centred on the fountain.
As calm descended, Martin could hear his heart pounding. He felt elated, but he was drained as well. He turned to Javeed. ‘You okay, pesaram?’
Javeed beamed at him. ‘That was fantastic! I want to do it again!’
Some of the children around them were already disappearing, literally fading into transparency as they departed. Martin said, ‘Not today.’
‘But we can come back tomorrow?’
‘Not tomorrow.’
‘We have to come back!’ Javeed was horrified, as if Martin had shown him this glimpse of paradise only to slam the gates shut.
‘Don’t get upset, I didn’t say never.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Give me time to think about it.’
They headed back towards the dome. Martin knew they didn’t need to return the way they’d come in order to exit from the game, but he was reluctant to yank them out of the experience abruptly.
As they walked across the grass, he spotted a man and a boy walking a few metres away to their left; the man raised a hand and called out in English, ‘Hi! How’s it going?’
‘Hi.’ Martin stopped and waited for them to approach. ‘I was beginning to think I was the only adult here.’
‘Me too.’ The man’s icon had blue eyes and brown hair; he sounded like a native English speaker, but Martin couldn’t place his accent.
‘I’m Martin, this is my son Javeed. This is our first time in Zendegi.’
The man said, ‘I’m Luke. This is Hassan.’
Martin didn’t offer his hand; maybe when he’d had more experience with the gloves the subtleties of the process wouldn’t seem too daunting for a casual gesture. He turned to the boy. ‘Salaam, Hassan. Chetori?’
‘Salaam agha,’ Hassan replied shyly.
‘Zendegi is great,’ Luke said, ‘but we’re always famished afterwards.’
‘Yeah, you can’t fault it for a lack of exercise,’ Martin replied.
‘What you need is a snack that’s nutritious,’ Luke enthused, ‘and fun to eat!’
Martin stared at him. What were the odds that another man with a Western name and an Iranian son would be playing the same game at the same time? ‘You’re not actually a person, are you?’ he said.
Luke gazed back with a frozen smile, betraying no hint of offence. ‘I used to think that kebab-o-licious goodness could only come in a real kebab-’
Martin pointed his thumb to the ground, and found himself back in his castle. He flipped up the goggles’ screens and saw the sphere opening up around him. Within seconds he could see Javeed for real.
‘You okay?’
Javeed nodded, but said nothing. His posture had a hint of reserve that Martin knew was his punishment for failing to set a firm date for their return.
Martin left the gloves and goggles on the counter beside the desktop and they went downstairs. Omar was dealing with a customer, but Farshid was free and Javeed immediately began bombarding him with every detail of their experience. Martin stood and listened, feeling flat and a little disoriented; it was like coming out of a movie into daylight, or stepping off a plane from somewhere bright and exotic to face the same old mundane sights again.
Omar joined them. ‘What did you think?’
‘It was good.’ Martin gave him a shorter version than Javeed’s, which was still in progress. ‘I guess when you pay for it, you don’t have to put up with the walking advertisements?’
‘Yeah. You can get a discount if you let them bug you, but it’s your choice.’
Martin laughed. ‘That’s a relief. It will be good to go back and be certain that everyone around us is real.’
Omar’s smile became equivocal.
Martin said, ‘What? Why can’t I be sure of that?’
‘It’s not just ads,’ Omar explained. ‘They put in Proxies for fun as well. With some of the games there aren’t enough real people playing, so they need to make up the numbers to keep it from getting boring. Or sometimes there are characters nobody wants to be – roles that are needed, but aren’t very interesting.’
‘Okay.’ It made sense that some role-playing games would be padded out with grunts and cannon fodder, but Martin had never imagined that half the exuberant children splashing water onto stone in the labyrinth’s courtyard could have been the same: software extras inserted to bolster the mood. ‘Won’t that get confusing, though? What if Javeed thinks he’s making a new friend?’
Omar shook his head impatiently. ‘You can always get Zendegi to tag the Proxies if you want to. But why spoil the fun? Maybe Javeed will play football in a stadium with twenty thousand people watching. Maybe you and twenty others will be real. Does he need to know which ones? When you take him to a movie, do you sit there pointing out which characters are real human extras and which ones are CGI?’
‘Hmm.’ Martin could see the logic of it, but he still wasn’t entirely happy.
Javeed had reached his third iteration of refinements and corrections in his story to Farshid. Martin put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Bas, pesaram. Say thanks to Uncle Omar, then come and help me make lunch.’
Martin drove into the city with Javeed guarding the meal they’d cooked. Mahnoosh closed the shop and they sat on the floor in the back room, eating. Or rather, Martin ate and Mahnoosh tried to as Javeed regaled her nonstop with stories of Zendegi. By the time Martin had to go and re-open the shop, Javeed’s plate had barely been touched.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mahnoosh said. ‘I’ll reheat it at home.’
Martin kissed them both good-bye. Javeed stood passively when Martin embraced him; if he’d been sulking he would have squirmed away, but this was his subtle freeze-out, where he declined to reciprocate affection, but also eschewed overt signs of hostility.
People of the Book was open until nine; Martin didn’t mind the first few hours, but the evenings dragged. He’d given up hoping that they’d ever be able to afford an assistant to take the night shifts; the rent on the shop kept going up, and while their sales weren’t falling, the numbers were flat. The only way to increase revenue would be to put up prices, and a cyber-ketab – with ten complimentary bestsellers pre-loaded – already cost less than five hardbacks.
Still, their customers weren’t deserting them yet. As Martin was getting ready to close, an elderly woman in a headscarf approached the counter.
‘Do you have The Moor’s Last Sigh?’ she asked.
‘In Farsi or English?’
‘Farsi.’
Martin checked on the computer. ‘That’s print-on-demand. I could run it off for you now, if you like.’
‘Please.’
Martin tapped the screen and the machine behind him started humming. ‘Good choice,’ he told the woman. ‘It’s my favourite of his. And it has the distinct advantage of never having been made into a song by U2.’
She smiled nervously and looked around, as if she was afraid someone might overhear them. But she could have bought an electronic version in the privacy of her home if she’d wanted to. Instead, she’d chosen to walk out into the night and come back with an aromatic bundle of permanently inked pages, adorned with the name of the infamous apostate.
Martin put the book into a plain brown bag; it was warm as a freshly baked loaf. The woman paid cash. When she’d left, he stepped out onto Enqelab Avenue and pulled down the security shutters.
By the time Martin arrived home he was ravenous. Mahnoosh had eaten earlier, with Javeed, but she joined him anyway.
‘How did things go at the school?’ she asked, scraping the last of the tadigh onto his plate.
Martin recounted the glitch with the enrolment form, and Javeed’s anxiety about her parents. ‘When I told him that your father had cut you off, he asked me if I’d ever do the same to him.’
Mahnoosh’s face crumpled in sympathy, but then her expression softened almost to a smile and she looked at Martin as if it all made perfect sense. ‘Zal and the Simorgh,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘From the Shahnameh.’
Martin shook his head. He’d known that Mahnoosh was mining a children’s version of Ferdowsi’s epic for bedtime stories, but he’d done no more than glance at the book himself.
‘Zal is born with white hair, like an old man,’ she explained. ‘His father is so superstitious that he abandons him in the wilderness, but the Simorgh – a giant bird with a dog’s head – finds him and raises him. Later, his father has a dream that the boy is still alive, and he goes into the mountains to ask his son’s forgiveness and bring him back.’
Martin bit back a complaint about the suitability of the story; would he have protested over ‘Hansel and Gretel’? But he could see how it might have planted an idea in Javeed’s head that would have been rendered more real and threatening by a reminder of his grandparents’ behaviour.
‘Are you sure they’re never going to reconcile with you?’ Martin still struggled to comprehend how anyone could maintain a feud with their own daughter for so long. ‘They must want to see their grandson.’
‘They have other grandsons,’ Mahnoosh replied. ‘I’ve been dead to them for twenty-seven years; one more grandchild isn’t going to change that.’
‘What would?’
Mahnoosh pondered the question. ‘Maybe a pilgrimage to Karbala over broken glass, and a written renunciation of everything I believe in.’
‘If they’re that fanatical, I guess you’d have to divorce me as well.’
She shrugged. ‘They kicked me out twelve years before I’d even met you. And if you’d seen the band I was in back then, you’d know you just don’t rate on the burning-bridges-with-the-parents scale.’
‘I can’t believe you don’t have video.’ Martin had seen a few still photos, but Mahnoosh had been unrecognisable. In fact, she’d looked disturbingly like Robert Smith. He knew there’d been an underground music scene in Tehran, but an all-female Goth-metal band called Unquiet Grave must have been several kilometres beneath the pavement.
‘If your parents are a lost cause,’ he said, ‘there must be someone in your family who hasn’t disowned you.’
‘Don’t bet on it; my sisters are even worse!’ She thought for a while. ‘One of my mother’s cousins was okay, but I think she went to America, and anyway, I haven’t seen her since I was a kid.’ She sighed. ‘Look, let’s not make a big deal of this. Javeed has enough “aunties” and “uncles” and “cousins” to spoil any child. I’ve never met my sisters’ brats, but I bet he’s luckier having Farshid around than any of them.’
‘Yeah.’ Martin put his plate aside. ‘So, what do you think about Zendegi?’
‘Ah.’ Mahnoosh smiled. ‘I promised I’d go in with him next week, after school. To see for myself, before we sign up for a subscription.’
‘You’ll like it,’ Martin assured her. ‘It’s a lot of fun. Just… stay away from anyone who looks like some marketing software’s idea of your trusted next-door neighbour. There’s no danger that they’ll talk you into buying anything, but it still feels awkward when you have to call their bluff and walk away.’
After he’d washed the dishes and had a quick shower, Martin went to Javeed’s room and stood at the foot of his bed. ‘Shab bekheyr, pesaram,’ he whispered – softly, but not too softly to be heard. Javeed’s sleep was always disturbed by the sound of Martin coming home: voices and the clatter of plates from the kitchen, creaking floorboards, running water. If Martin failed to say goodnight before the house fell silent, Javeed would wake and call out for him.
Martin walked over to the bookcase beside the bed and picked up what he hoped was the right volume. Out in the light of the passageway he checked; it was the book of stories from the Shahnameh. He found ‘Zal and the Simorgh’, and stood leaning against the wall as he read.
Upon spotting the infant Zal, who’d been left to die of exposure at the foot of the Alborz Mountains – the same mountains you could see from half the streets of Tehran – the giant bird had brought him back to her nest with the intention of feeding him to her chicks. Miraculously though, the whole family of predators had taken pity on him. In fact, the Simorgh turned out to be a soft touch, feeding her adopted son the best leftovers, and even giving him a few magic feathers as a parting gift when his repentant father came to take him back.
Nothing too frightening, and everyone was reconciled at the end. If Javeed was upset that Mahnoosh’s own parents hadn’t followed the script, Martin would just have to convince him that there were other kinds of happy ending.