At night, after Mark came home from work, Romi would go to his place, and in the darkened bedroom he would scroll through pornography until he found what he was looking for, and then would fuck her from behind as she lay on her stomach and they watched two or three men penetrating one woman on the massive screen of his TV, pushing their dicks into her pussy and her ass and her mouth, everyone breathing and moaning in surround sound. Just before he came, Mark would slap Romi hard on the ass, thrusting himself into her and calling her a whore, enacting some ancient pain that drove him to believe that the woman he loved would never remain true to him. One night after this performance Mark had fallen asleep with his arms around her, and Romi had lain awake, for, exhausted as she always was, she couldn’t sleep. Finally she shimmied out from under him and crawled around on the floor in search of her underwear. Having no desire to stay, and no desire to go, she’d sunk back down on the edge of Mark’s bed and felt the remote under her. She switched on the TV and surfed the channels, passed over the stories of mother elephants and bee colonies that she had watched with her father, over the cold cases and the late-night talk shows, until she pushed the button once more and there, nearly filling the enormous screen, was Ershadi’s face. For a second it appeared larger than life in the otherwise dark room, and then it was lost again, because her thumb had continued its restless search before she realized what she was seeing. When she flipped back, she couldn’t find him. There was nothing on about film, or Iran, or Kiarostami. She sat there, startled and bewildered in the dark, and then slowly a sense of longing came over her like a wave, and she started to laugh for the first time since her father had died, and she knew it was time to go home.

There was no choice but to believe Romi. Her story was so precise that she couldn’t have made it up. Sometimes she exaggerated the details, but she did it believing the exaggerations, and this only made her more lovable, because it showed you what she could do with the raw material of the world. And yet, after I went home and the spell of her presence wore off, I lay on my bed feeling sad and empty and increasingly depressed, since not only was my encounter with Ershadi not unique, but, worse, unlike Romi, I’d had no idea what it meant, or what I was supposed to do with it. I had failed to understand anything, or take anything from it, and had told the story as a joke, laughing at myself. Lying alone in the dark, I started to cry. Sick of the pain throbbing in my ankle, I swallowed a handful of Advil in the bathroom. The pills swilled in my stomach with the wine I’d drunk, and soon enough nausea overtook me, and then I was kneeling on the bathroom floor, throwing up into the toilet.