The Golden State

The now beet-red Honey has been tiring herself out running through the cemetery grass in the heat and I see her approach the outer reach of the plateau and spring after her, catching her near the edge of the property where she’s looking as though transfixed by the expanse of sagebrush and patchy farmland of the basin. I pick her up and kiss her and plod back to the gravestones where our stroller is parked. I didn’t bring any flowers with me so I fold up Honey’s bib and put it on Mom’s stone. “Love you Mom,” I say. “I wish you were here,” and a slow leak of tears starts up again. “That’s your grandma,” I tell Honey, who is stomping her little foot on someone else’s stone. I pack her up in the stroller struggling and I’m suddenly exhausted and as I’m trying for the seventh time to buckle at least one of the buckles as she thrashes and strains resolutely forward to prevent me I say into the air “I’m going to fucking kill myself” which I sometimes do when I’m trying to cope with her equipage and I instantly feel bad since I’m sure we are standing on the final resting place of many untimely ends, shotgun blasts and death by drinking and getting rolled on by your horse. Finally I get her in and we roll down the hill to Deakins Park and I let myself think about Istanbul, about Engin and Pelin and Savaş and Elifnaz and seventeen million people or more humming along on either side of the Bosphorus in the June heat. She’s asleep when we arrive and I scoop her into the Pack ’n Play so easily that I think my ancestors are rewarding me for visiting them.

I step outside to have a cigarette and Cindy Cooper is there on her deck and we each take a few steps in the other’s direction and exchange greetings. “What do you do down there in the City,” she asks me after a minute. “I work at the University.” I could leave it there but I am curious so I say “At the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations.” As it happens Cindy has unreconstructed views about Islam and she begins airing them to me over the fence. “Gotta do something about them,” she says and I say “What do you mean?” and naturally she means beheading people, murdering at Charlie Hebdo, etc. etc. I think about stubbing out my cigarette and going inside but this is honestly the easiest hill of tolerance to ascend and moreover my job as an employee of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations not to mention as a member of God’s human family. “You know my husband is uh… Muslim,” I say, wincing inside, since he would take grave offense at this, since as far as he is concerned he is not a Muslim, if he has a religion it is Morrissey, and he is in fact so much not a Muslim that he won’t even say inshallah or mashallah or other things that warmly enfold the name of God into daily speech. I have heard Ayşe use what I am pretty sure but not positive is a pejorative term for heavily veiled women meaning “squished-head” but she is interested in spirituality and transcendental meditation and “Eastern” things although I do not know whether she actually does them. Engin’s father, who is divorced from Ayşe and lives in Izmir, is a somewhat dissolute Marxist, anti-Islam, anti-Erdoğan, anti-American for that matter. But their parents were Muslims so they are loosely speaking culturally Muslims and since Cindy is starting from “Muslims are bad” and America more or less treats “Muslim” as an ethnicity rather than a religious choice it does not seem like a time for nuance, so for now I decide to deploy them as pleasant cultural Muslims in the jihad of tolerance. “Well,” she says. “He’s from Turkey,” I say and she moves the corners of her mouth down as though to say Whaddaya know.

“Yeah, and he’s stuck there now because the U.S. government has anti-Muslim policies.”

I give her the rough outline of the unlawful relinquishment of his green card in the bowels of the San Francisco airport. So far the only thing worse than dealing with the green card situation has been explaining the green card situation to other people, even to know its full madness firsthand requires a graduate seminar in the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unit and then the Department of State’s National Visa Center and all associated forms and procedures and phone menus, menus where you press 3 to be hung up on after an hour of holding; numbers that due to the high volume of callers must be called back between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00; numbers that ring and ring and ring into the void, a human voice answering one in a hundred times; websites giving you instructions like “If you are granted an immigrant visa, the consular officer will give you a packet of information. Do not open this packet.” I just tell her that he had one and they took it under false pretenses.