“I say so. And the rest of it, it has to do with that first thing I spoke of: marriage. I want to tell you about what happened to me after one of my trips when I came back home. We were living in New York City then. My posting as a financial journalist was there. But I had to go away often, leaving my wife and child alone in a land full of, well, enthusiasm.”

Footsteps were coming toward us. I switched on the flashlight and shined it at the wall. The men might have liked Abu Faranci well enough by now, but he was still a foreigner. Sitting in the dark with him while the mokeb was bustling would make simple men skeptical. And they would take that skepticism out on him. Someone would. Maybe Maysam or Cleric J or Haji Yusuf, or any of the lesser guys in this place. The truth was that we were always a trigger away from some kind of destruction. We lived in the moment and it revealed itself in the sheer mountains of garbage we were able to produce. Refuse sat all around us. Plastic and feces. More plastic and more feces. The transience of it all made us madmen. It is easy to misuse the word “mad,” but madness on the scale I speak of can only issue forth in war. Or perhaps in violent revolution. It has no place elsewhere. And madness does not take kindly to the dark.

Maysam stuck his head inside and asked who was here.

“Ana wa Abu Faranci,” I offered.

Just then the light popped on. A momentary blindness and then the three of us regarded each other. In Maysam’s eyes was the look of the doer, the man who worries after others and holds the power of death and life. Without saying it, he still seemed to be saying, It is not too late if you think this man is an impostor. We can stick his head under water, you know! Just give me the word.

I said, “Abu Faranci wants to turn to Islam.”

Maysam did not smile or offer a show of enthusiasm. He looked at Abu Faranci, turned back to me, and then his face seemed to say, This is acceptable, and timely. Then he was gone.

Abu Faranci said, “Maysam is the only one who still has distrust for me.”

“He manages our security. It’s his job to distrust. It’s not personal.”

I waited again. There were voices in my head. The last time I’d tried to get on the metro in Tehran, I imagined the oncoming train to be a tank, an Abrams to be specific—Americans. It had been at the Taleghani station and when I ran out from underground, just about suffocating, I came face-to-face with a guy selling pineapples right in front of the door of the former American embassy where they’d painted a death skull.