Avesta needed me now. That attempt at a handshake gave it away. He would have air-kissed me otherwise.

I reached over and kissed my mother. Her reaction was slow but definite. “Why have you no hand?” she said. Then her head swiveled just as slowly and she zeroed back in on the television. She was a blank. I was losing her the way you lose a toy you stopped playing with years ago.

“What can I do for you?” I said to the pretend cousin.

“You have to write an article and take everything back about what you said regarding that Homa woman.”

“Miss Homa to you.”

“Whatever. She’s becoming too famous outside of this dump of a country and—”

“It doesn’t suit you?”

“Because of what you wrote, everyone here thinks I stole my dome and minaret paintings from her.”

“Well, the domes you did steal from her. And the minarets you stole out of inspiration from the domes. So technically you are a thief.”

“A curse on you, Saleh!”

“But no worries, cousin. In art everyone is a thief. I don’t see why you’ve come all the way from—wherever it is you live now, Paris? Berlin? New York?—come all the way here to this, as you correctly put it, dump of a country to complain about an article no one cares about.”

He stared at his invented aunt, my mother, as if he needed a witness.

There are people who want and want. I had spent the last years of childhood being invited once in a blue moon to this family’s immaculate homes in the north of Tehran where they kept pristine swimming pools even in the worst days of the revolution and during the war with Iraq; I’d been relegated to the kitchen to eat with the servants while my mother worked to ingratiate herself with our new rich relatives.

This world was empty that way, and a man like Avesta still wanted to have more of everything.

Avesta gestured at me to follow him outside. He didn’t say anything until we were well beyond the walls of the nursing home. Across the street two men sat in front of an expensive-looking Citroën. One of those men was Saeed, my backstabbing filmmaker partner. He didn’t get out of the car.

I said to Avesta, “It was you who was having me followed yesterday. You could have just knocked, you know.”

“What about that article you are going to write taking back everything you said about Miss Homa’s work?”

I started to repeat my usual line, that I was just a poor writer and that my words were not even worth the paper they were printed on. But he stopped me.

“I’ll pay you. I’ll give you two paintings.”

Avesta had been trying forever to make a name for himself beyond, to him, the lowly Middle East. But when middle age came and he was still not considered a tier-one international artist, he’d settled on the art markets of the Gulf where he too was followed by Emirati collectors the way Miss Homa was. With our currency’s value plummeting as it was, one of his paintings could now buy me an apartment here. Two of them could buy me two apartments. I could rent out both of them and not have to think about writing art reviews anymore.