As his fortieth birthday approaches, James Dublin Sparrow can remember almost none of his childhood. It bothers him that his brother and sisters seem to know more of his life than he does. He has only glimpses.

He remembers a moment. It might be his fifth birthday, maybe a few days after. His mother has dropped him off at the day care (one she later assures him he demanded he attend). He passes his accustomed class because he has been told that five-year-olds attend kindergarten. He thinks he learned this from a girl a few months older than he is; she is in the kindergarten class. As he enters the classroom, the kindergarten teacher’s confusion is quickly replaced with amusement as she hears his purpose. Her mockery is softened in the way adults do when the object is a child, but it is there, and for the first time in his memory, he feels the sting of humiliation.

That same year, a man is on television, walking in a foreign place, planting a flag. He remembers pride and joy he doesn’t fully understand. His memory puts him in a kindergarten classroom, but he is sure it is false. Perhaps he is remembering the moment when the men who went to the moon are safely retrieved from the ocean.

An accident mars his childhood and draws a line between glimpses he recalls with crystal clarity and those that exist in isolated packets of unfocused color. He is sure he remembers the accident. Even removed by thirty-five years and more than a thousand miles, he clearly sees himself pressing the button at the crossing. He is six, and he and Tom Revere have been walking home from kindergarten together for almost a month (although in his memory it feels like years). He can feel himself step off the curb, hear Tom’s worried caution of the approaching car, then nothing. He thinks he may have called for his mother and expressed bitter disappointment when his father answered. He isn’t sure.

The woman driving the car that hit him claims that he and she had undergone a period of false starts and stops, an odd dance that led unavoidably to the accident, and that she only tapped him, really. But then, he wonders, how did he end up across the road? How were his shoes left behind exactly where he had been standing when he was struck?

However it happened, it happened. He miraculously arose from a traumatic delirium only an hour later, and although he is told that his injuries number only a bump on his head and a bruise on his back, he can feels that something is no longer entirely right. There is a jarring crack in his memory, a badly-jointed seam between his childhood and his youth, a chasm between himself and the happier times he is assured existed.

He doesn’t remember the great-grandmother in Missouri. He is told she was a kindly woman and he has no reason to doubt it, but, if he tries very hard, he can only summon an impression of great fear. Nor does he remember falling down the cellar stairs. He was four and was learning to tie his shoes, but he was neglectful, he is told, and the result was a trip down the stairs. He thinks it is possible that he merely tripped over his own feet, or that his legs relaxed randomly, as they have all his life, but he doesn’t know, so he accepts the story he is told. He hears many stories, but they are of some other person. Some child who never flew from a bumper.

Tom and James are friends through kindergarten and the first grade. Once, Tom’s parents invite James along with their family to one of those live shows that are meant to appeal to children, Disney on Ice, perhaps, or the circus. Tom’s sister, Karen, is with them. For James, Karen is the center of the world. She is a year older than the boys and has eyes only for James’s older brother Roger, but James only minds that when Rog is around, and he feels that slow sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The rest of the time he feels only joy at her presence and giddiness at her touch. It is an adult conceit to think that children can’t feel the sort of love that creates families, that lifelong commitment or lifelong regret are licenses of the mature heart. James never truly forgets Karen, even though he is sure she never knows his feelings for her. All his life, James is plagued by a tendency to love easily and deeply.

On this day, at the show, Karen has been suppressing the symptoms of the case of the mumps that has been developing in her young body. She has obsessed about this show for weeks. During intermission, the illness, the hot dog, and the noisy and noisome press of the crowd combine their forces against her, and, as the lights rise on the second act, she suddenly vomits allover the man seated in the next row down. Or maybe it’s James who becomes ill that day. He has always ignored his body’s signals and warnings until it is too late, especially when they conflict with his desires.

For his seventh birthday, James’s parents allow him to hold a skating party for his friends from school. He spends hours laboring over invitations. This is his responsibility, his mother tells him. She has copied the main list of invitations from the student list his teacher provided for room mothers, and she corrects his handwriting and the spelling of names. In the end, he is sure, she simply completes the invitations herself.

The remains of youthful beauty and hope haunt her face, though her eyes are hunted, and her delicate frame is hidden beneath drooping layers of depression and defeat. He thinks she still may be beautiful at the time of the party, but the faces we knew are always shadowed by the ones we know, and his memory reflects an old woman, tired from an unjust existence and too many disappointments.

James is her last child. Complications of his birth resulted in a hysterectomy to save his mother’s life. By the time he was born she had been pregnant more or less constantly for seven years. Now, she is a mother with a rapidly emptying nest, and no hope of new nestlings to fill the void of what she has been for over a decade. Her children’s school responsibilities and developing life have forced her to become a supporting player on her own stage. Growth can be like death, sometimes, when it sneaks past us and leaves us bewildered in its wake.

She doesn’t think of James as her favorite. She impresses on his siblings the importance of caring for their younger brother; he is not sickly, but he is small, even for his age, and he is allowed—forced even—to be younger than he is. She cheats herself in games and allows him to win when she can; she has done this for all of her children, but they competed with each other. James has no younger sibling rising to challenge him, and he has two years of easy wins in rigged games.

The party is a mixed blessing. James is happy to see his friends enjoying themselves, happy to receive their gifts, but he is sad, because he knows that he will soon leave all of his friends behind. He is sure that he doesn’t really know this, but, in his memory, he knows that, at the end of the school year, his family will sell their house and move to Georgia. His father, who was going to resign his commission and raise his young family here in Colorado, has accepted a transfer to Warner Robbins.

James’s father is a short man, but by no means a small man. At five feet, six inches, he weighs nearly two hundred pounds, almost all of it muscle. His body and arms are disproportionately long in relation to his legs, giving him the appearance, to a casual observer, of a silver back gorilla. His body is covered in coarse, dark hair, reinforcing the observation.

He is the second son of a railway man. There is physical power in his family line that he doesn’t see reflected in his youngest son. His father was once trapped between railway cars, almost smashed like a bug, and rose for work the next morning. The skinny thing his wife gave him before becoming barren would have snapped like a twig. His mother gave his father four sons and a daughter in five years, all of them strong and obedient.

The physical abuse, at least James’s knowledge of it, won’t begin for a few years, but already the cruel streak is there. James’s father has the ability to summon a lifetime, a family history, of rage and focus it into a single hard glare of burning hatred. “Sparrow Eyes” the family calls it, because it is an inherited talent. It is a look that can end fights without a blow being passed. It conveys the bearer’s utter disdain for the life of the target. It communicates to the target that causing his slow, painful death would be no inconvenience to the bearer. It communicates pure loathing and inescapable death. James’s father, who has taught his children that there are dire consequences for direct disobedience enjoys turning this look on his youngest son. He tells the boy, ”look at me,” then strikes him with the glare of Sparrow Eyes, holding his son’s gaze and assuring him wordlessly how inconsequential the young child’s death would be to him. He maintains this mental brutality for as long as it takes. He knows the outcome. Eventually, James will drop his gaze, tears of fear and shame clouding his face.

Georgia is a different sort of place than Colorado was. They live in a gated military community that serves as quarters for the families of officers and noncoms working at the base. The community is Air Force property, an annex to the main base on the other side of town. The first year, a bus carries the Sparrow children to the elementary school on the main base. The following year, a second school is completed, one within walking distance of the Sparrow home.

Warner Robbins is a large base, one of the largest SAC bases in the country. The city of Warner Robbins exists merely to service the base, and most of its inhabitants are civilian employees of the Air Force in one way or another. Greeley was a cow town, it’s primary industry the high-density feed lots just west of the city proper, and its only military connection was a small Bell and Howell plant, an Air National Guard station, and its proximity to the silos in Cheyenne Wyoming a few hundred miles to the north. James’s dad, a captain at the time, oversaw the construction and maintenance of radio and radar towers in Greeley, commanding a very small squadron that was technically attached to the Guard station. In Warner Robbins, his dad is a major and commands a much larger unit. They’re charged with upgrading and maintaining the Base’s telecommunications systems and ensuring their link in the newly developed first-response system.

In Greeley, the school had been an open-concept school, where the children were encouraged to proceed at their own rate. James had blazed through all of his courses. In Georgia, his transcripts and the results of an Iowa Standard test suggest to James’s new teacher that, perhaps, he is better suited to early advancement. James’s mother decides that would be a bad idea. James will be happier with people his own age. James suspects she has other reasons.

James learns he can lie. His family tells him that he was lying before this, that he had once convinced a teacher of a “fact” that he had made up entirely on the spot, but this lie is different. This lie is pointless. James will remember it for as long as he lives, and this lie, along with one other, will be the lies he turns to when he needs to remind himself how stupid and wrong lying is.

It happens the second year that they are in Georgia. James’s school—the new school, Linwood—has hired a Spanish teacher to come in to all of the classes for an hour a week and teach the children some very basic Spanish. Before the first lesson, the classroom teacher asks if anyone already knows Spanish, and James, for no reason he can explain even now, raises his hand. He was born in Mexico, he claims (he was born in Okinawa), and picked it up during his childhood there (even had he been born in Mexico, his family was transferred to South Carolina when he was one). Somehow, his teacher believes him, and he is excused from class every time the Spanish instructor comes and allowed private study time in the library. Usually, he watches film loops of the “Dinosaur” sequence from Fantasia. Dinosaurs fascinate him, and when he was younger he had an imaginary dinosaur friend. It will take a few more years before he is fully disabused of his desire to become a paleontologist.

There is another boy excused. His father is Puerto Rican, and Spanish is spoken in his home as often as English. James’s knowledge of actual Spanish is entirely gleaned from Speedy Gonzales cartoons. It takes less than a day of listening to him spewing out disconnected Spanish words and exclamations intermingled with latin-sounding gibberish syllables before the other boy confronts James and tells him to stay away. James doesn’t realize until much later how offended the other boy must have been, how much he had derided the boy’s heritage and family.

No one else learns of the lie, however, and it becomes the cornerstone piece in James’s personal collection of shame, in quiet moments he will take it out and stare deep into this lie and others, and moments of foolishness, and moments of just plain wrongness. Every detail of these moments is cut in the finest crystal, preserved for all eternity in the private globe of James’s memory. His own little Fabergé egg of guilt.

Another piece is carved in the egg, this one less precise, less deeply studied than the First Lie, but it is no less painful for James to mull over. Third grade boys are obsessed with bodily functions. So obsessed, in fact, that they make loud noises and verbal abuses of any function they come across. None of the boys use the stalls in the bathroom during the group break after lunch, to do so—even to urinate—would be to invite the full weight of the other boys’ derision. Boys would run coughing and gagging from the rest room, choked out by odors that may not even exist.

This is anathema to James. In his mother’s house, bodily functions are taboo. It is appalling to James to have these functions broadcast. One day, James realizes that he needs to use a stall after lunch. He decides he can hold it, for a little while.

Somehow, he forgets. His body doesn’t. His mother isn’t home, so his father has to leave work to deliver him home.

It isn’t the only time that year that his forgetfulness causes an accident. There is a playground across the street from the Sparrow house in Warner Robbins. One day, when James’s grandmother on his mother’s side is visiting, James waits too long. He tries to make it the short distance across the street to his bathroom, but his bladder has other ideas. As punishment for this crime, his grandmother forces him to disrobe to the urine-soaked underwear, and to spend the next hour (? two?) inside, forbidden to change, forbidden to cover himself. “If you’re going to act like a baby,” she tells him, “I’m going to treat you like one.”

James’s father has a mistress in Georgia. James isn’t sure at the time what a mistress is; he just knows that the mere mention of the woman’s name is enough to light the brittle tender of his parent’s marriage into an explosion of angry vituperative.

Janie Carpenter is a nice enough woman. She works as Major Sparrow’s secretary at the base. Her husband is a sergeant in the Air Force, and a member of the base’s security police detail. They have two children together, both girls, each about the ages of James and his brother. And she’s fucking James’s father.

James doesn’t remember this last detail, not in any real sense. He remembers that she’s his father’s mistress, but in his memory, that word has no more freighting than it would have to say she is his father’s oncologist. Less, really—third-grade James knows what an oncologist is, and cancer is a death sentence in 1972.

One night, while the children are outside during a party, James and the older daughter kiss and promise to marry each other when they grow up. The younger daughter runs in and tells their parents. James’s father is livid; James never understands why.

The following summer, they are transferred again, this time to Iran. James’s father is giving command of a squadron assigned to train members of the Imperial Iranian Air Force in the use and maintenance of American technology. It maybe at this time that James’s father is promoted to major, rather than the transfer to Georgia. James isn’t sure; it was all so long ago.

In any case, the assignment is a plum, and a harbinger of good things ahead for his father’s career. Since making the decision to become career Air Force, James’s father has been looking to rise as far as he can, and foreign service is one of the surest steps in becoming a general officer. James’s father served multiple tours in the Far East, but he had been a junior officer at the time, now he was being given a foreign command.

History has not been kind to Iran. Once the heart of the great Persian Empire, the land between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf has had more than its share of invasions. Alexander betrayed his father-in-law, Xerxes, and invaded during his own wedding feast. He burned the market city of Persepolis to the ground and marched east to the Khyber Pass, leaving a proud and ancient people crushed behind him. The Romans never quite reached the ancient empire, limited as they were by Augustus’s declaration of boundaries, but they exacted tribute from them, and it was from Persia that the Magi of Christian legend quested for the Holy Child. After the fall of Rome, the Persians endured wave after wave of invader, from both directions: the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Portuguese, the Russians. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Empire-That-Was had been whittled away to a small nation-state the size of Texas.

Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi is the last Shah. His reign has been riddled with insurrection and rebellion, including one that forced him to flee the country. On his return, he embarked on social and political reforms designed to ease suffering in his country and bring his nation technologically and philosophically into the twentieth century. He has met resistance. His policy of purchasing land for redistribution to the poor (and his donations of royal lands to that pool), and his social reforms—many of them violations of the Shiite interpretation of the Q’uran—have provided his enemies with money and more than a little popular support. He has created a secret police force called Savak to ferret out the rebels, and their actions undermine his attempts at democratizing and opening the country. In five years, Shiite extremists, with traditional landowner support, will overwhelm his government and force him to flee again, and for the last time.

The recent American interesting Iran, either by luck or design, has taken a little of the heat off of the Shah’s regime. Far from the missionary saviors they see themselves, the Americans—military, diplomatic and commercial, alike—are seen by the Iranians as yet another in a long string of invaders, and the American presence is just another occupation they must endure on the long path back to the old Empire.

James won’t know any of this until much later. For now, Iran is just a minor part of a world he knows only through cartoons, where caricatured eunuchs bearing farcically large scimitars chase rabbits across a sand swept landscape. Bigotry comes easily. Jim Crow has been dead for less than a generation, and the full public stigma against personal prejudice is nearly a decade away. His grandparents on both sides are openly derisive of all minorities. His mother, while trying very hard to be egalitarian nonetheless falls prey to the racist perceptions of her upbringing. His father is as in so many other things, his own. He has no qualms against using race and racial epithets to increase his own rank by reducing someone else, but it’s impossible for James to say whether he was actually racist, or simply pragmatic in his methods.

The proud people of Iran, with their Islam-inspired superstitions and tight-jawed devotion to a dead empire, are excellent targets for the racist derision that made America’s post-colonial colonialism so hated. James’s mother describes in frightening detail how Iranian men kidnap boys for backroom harems, sometimes taking them on the street in front of God and everybody; she has no evidence for this activity, nor can she cite a single anecdote of its occurrence, but she is convinced it is true. James’s father, freshly back from a preliminary tour of duty to meet his staff and assess his responsibilities, describes the Iranians difficulty understanding the basic utility of a screwdriver; he neglects to mention that the screwdriver in question is a high-powered pneumatic driver designed to secure bolts to microwave towers, and James is baffled by the enormous stupidity of a people who can’t grasp a concept as simple as a screw.

Just before they leave, James contracts a flu. He tells his parents he doesn’t feel well, but they don’t believe him. Or maybe they do, but there is nothing they can do about it. His father is angry at him and treats him with less kindness than he would a disobedient airman. On the way, they stop in Rome for a day or two; James is sick and doesn’t remember any of it, except his parents’ dissatisfaction with the ancient Italian hotel where they are first booked. The second night, they check into the brand new and unbearably American Holiday Inn on the outskirts of the ancient city.

He remembers one other moment from the stopover. He is tired and cranky. He can’t remember whether this is because he has been aboard a cook’s list of airliners all day, or whether it was the forced-march of Roman sites the family endured on their only full day in town. He is still sick, he remembers that, and even if he didn’t what happened next would remind him. His father has decided that the family needs to have dinner at one of the sidewalk cafes in town (this must be the first night because James clearly remembers the old hotel with its bidets and Crapper-patent water closets). James argues that he doesn’t feel well—he thinks he does—but he is over-ridden; no other person’s need is worthy of consideration if it conflicts with his father’s desire. They sit outside in the mellowing summer heat of the city as the restaurant’s owner putters in and out. At a point between courses, James mouth fills with what he has just swallowed. He forces it back. It happens again and again he forces it back, catching his father’s rising anger as he does. The third time, his whole stomach drives upward with overwhelming force.

The restaurant owner is appalled. He can’t believe that his food has caused such a thing (it hasn’t), and he showers the parents with apologies as he leads James’s mother to the bathroom in the back so she can clean the child and ensure he won’t be spewing forth any more spaghetti. The rest is a jumble. His father gets lost on their way to the airport to leave, there is something about a stopover in Ankara that is rerouted to Damascus (or vice versa), there is some dickering about passports and there are some lectures regarding how far their diplomatic immunity goes as dependents. An oddity of the Iranian legal system comes to mind: pedestrians, if they see an oncoming car, are expected to move out of the way and are considered at fault for any accidents if they don’t. This is a remnant of the dying feudal system in the country, anyone walking is expected to be a peasant, and should rightfully—in the eyes of the Iranian courts—clear the way for one of their betters. The Americans create a myth of Islamic expectation of God’s intervention as long as the people are unaware of impending doom.

All new Americans are boarded in the palatial Sheraton Inn on the outskirts of Teheran. They stay for nearly a month, while James’s father works and looks for a house they can afford on his allowance; this takes time as the presumption of wealth encourages prospective landlords to charge Americans higher rents than they would their countrymen. James and his siblings occupy their time in the hotel room learning card games from their mother (she always loses—by design). Sometimes they swim in the hyper-chlorinated pool; the chlorine and the unaccustomed intensity of the desert sun combine to overwhelm the children’s skin, and they must apply lotion, something James has never needed to do, nor will ever need do after—his skin is thick and olive and sunburns generally fade into rich, golden tans.

One day, Roger, who has shown some remarkable skill as a diver, missteps while attempting a gainer; he clips his back on the hard diving board on his way to the water and hits hard. He stays under water for more than a few minutes (it will always seem like hours to James, but biology has taught him it couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes); he later says it was intentional, that he was embarrassed by the misstep and the water felt good on his raspberried back. Their mother is dubious, and believes that he may have been unconscious, but allows that he seems unharmed beyond the marks of the board on his back.

The hotel has a casino on one of the upper floors. Children are strictly refused admission, but there are jackpot machines on the terrace overlooking the pool, and nobody watches them. Sometimes, when they can, Rog and James steal five rial pieces from their mother and play the machine. They never win, and James can’t now imagine what they would have done if they had.

The Gulf District, on Saltanatabad Boulevard is considered American soil. It is jointly managed by the military and the diplomatic corps. It is all the fun parts of an American city in the center of a foreign capital. The Sparrows come here often for the boys’ Little League Baseball games, and their father’s work-league softball. They come for movies at the repertory cinema, and comics sold two for a quarter at the co-op. They come to walk in a place of safety and to enjoy the company of fellow Americans in this most foreign of lands.

James doesn’t remember how the confrontation begins. He remembers that the boys he faces are much larger and older than he. He vaguely remembers a threat of some kind against him. He remembers panicking and invoking his older brother, Roger, as some sort of superhero that would defend him against these enemies. Miraculously, Roger appears; he is significantly smaller than the other boys (he’s not quite two years older than James), but, when they set on him without warning, he makes a good showing, while James runs off to find help.

The house in Teheran would be beyond the Sparrows’ means were it in the United States. Four large bedrooms span two levels floored in Italian marble tile. A glass-enclosed atrium sparkles in the center (the atrium skylight is on the second floor patio and James’s mother will warn him and his brother off with repeated tellings of a boy she knew who fell though a skylight and took five days to die). The smallish backyard is dominated by an in-ground pool, and the whole affair is encircled in thick stone walls. The house sits at the top of a flat hill and the battlemented roof affords a spectacular view of the city. It later occurs to James that the house is imminently defensible; at the time, such things are beyond his notice or caring: he is blissfully unaware how dangerous being an American in Iran actually is.

Each morning, the school bus from the Teheran American School picks James up and, collecting momentum, attacks the mammoth hill rising to the home of the only other American family in the immediate neighborhood. In the winter, when the snows fall out of the nearby mountains and cover the roads with ice, the bus twice fails to successfully climb the back hill, and the two mothers, Mrs. Sparrow and Mrs. Donner, must rescue the children in their Jeep Waggoneers.

Betty Donner presides over a family much like the Sparrow family in appearance. Her husband, Bob, is a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and her three children, Bob, Jr., Jennifer, and Sarah are near the same age as James and Roger. Bob, Jr. is a year older than Rog, and the girls are James’s age and a year younger, respectively. The two families, partially due to proximity, and partially due (James believes) to intentional cultivation by the Donners, quickly become quite close. There is something odd about the Donners that, even now, James can’t put his finger on. The kids all know things. Things children probably shouldn’t. Often ditched by the older boys, James finds himself in the girls’ company, and their games lead inevitably to kissing, and not innocent, childhood kissing, either. James learns to kiss a girl properly; Jennifer and Sarah teach him to use a kiss to entice and tease, to raise feelings he’d never known before. It never goes past the kiss, and, to be honest, James isn’t sure at the time what there could possibly be (he and Rog watch a rape film that Bob, Jr. has stolen from his father’s stash of pornography, but the film is jittery and out of focus, and James is never quite sure who’s doing what to whom).

The bus ride to the elementary school complex of TAS is a long one. The growing American presence in Teheran necessitated the school’s acquisition of a separate elementary school, and the trustees found an old sanitarium on the outskirts of the city that suited their purposes. The middle and high schools still occupied the old buildings, formerly a Catholic mission school until the foreign service bought it and changed its mission to include the education of all American children.

The children amuse themselves in different ways on the bus ride. One day, they are comparing the scars of youth and other oddities of their bodies. James shows off the flexibility of his fingers. While not truly double-jointed, he has very flexible joints in his hands, and can touch each finger and thumb to his arm if he does so carefully. Another boy, a fifth-grader that James barely knows, is unimpressed by the slow stretching; he grabs James’s middle finger and wrenches it backward swiftly. James is sure he heard (felt?) a crack, but his father tells him his finger is just stoved, and his mother reminds him that he has a history of faking illness and injury for attention. A month later, maybe more, James slips on some ice and lands badly on his injured hand. His parents again doubt that he has broken anything, but his continued whining (as his father puts it) forces them to take him to the army hospital. He has broken his ring finger and pinky, both badly. The attending physician also points out to James’s parents that his middle finger was broken, but seems to have healed itself, if badly.

In February, the Sparrows and the Donners take a day trip together to ski in the nearby mountains. James, goaded by Roger, eschews the snowplow method of slow skiing he has just learned, and free-runs straight down the mountain. James’s mother wrenches her ankle early on, and sits aside watching for most of the day. She is covered with bruises, but she bruises easily.

In March, James and Rog go with their father on a fishing trip to Tabriz on the Caspian. They pull up to the Donners’ house in the early morning hours to meet with Bob and Bob, Jr.; James and Rog wait in the car as their father goes in to fetch the other men. An hour later, he returns and drives them home; the trip is off.

In April, the two families take a joint trip to Shiraz. James’s father has a TDY there, and he takes vacation days on either side to accommodate the journey by car (they have borrowed a Volkswagen minibus from Family Services for the purpose). The trip survives in James’s mind as a series of strange and surreal images. They stop for the first night at the ruins of an old …an old ruin. It may be a farmhouse, or it may be an old guard tower from one of the various empires and occupations. The children—all except James’s sisters, who are teenagers and have much more important things to do—spend their free time searching the place for artifacts and scorpions. They eat C-rations for dinner, each containing a canned meat, a dried vegetable and dessert, and a package of five cigarettes and book of matches. The children, all but Connie, James’s second sister, pocket the cigarettes before their parents can realize they have them. They have all been smoking since their time at the Sheraton.

Shiraz is a beautiful city. Built and rebuilt by dead khans and shahs, it is the home of Omar Khayyam, and his final resting place. The streets and avenues are lined with roses of wildly variant colors and odors. The whole city smells of rose. The Bazaar at Shiraz is one of the most famous in the world. It is loud and crowded, and filled with the buzz and dance of the art of haggling. James and Roger get decorative pocket knives, and Roger gets an “antique” battle set: a round iron shield, accompanied by a battle axe and a mace with the head of an ifrit. James thinks he got something else as well, but he can’t remember what it was or what happened to it, if he did.

The ruins of Persepolis lie near Shiraz, and one day the two families drive out to visit. They spend the day wandering the ruins, marveling at graffiti on the stones, some of it thousands of years old. As night falls, there is a light show with narration in three languages, telling the short history of the ancient city. The next day they begin their return home.

In May, Betty Donner tearfully informs James’s mother, her best friend, that she has been having an affair with James’s father since August of the previous year. James’s father has tossed her aside for yet another mistress, and Betty is seeking revenge and forgiveness.

In June, James’s mother takes her children, and as much as a spouse’s weight allowance will carry, and moves to Florida, to her mother’s house. They are disembarked during their stopover in Beirut. The Israelis—or the Christian rebels, or the Islamic rebels, or the secular government—are shelling the airport, and it isn’t safe to take off. After some hours, during a lull, they finally take off and fly directly to New York. They miss their connecting flight, but are given first class seats on a Lufthansa airliner to Orlando. They descend through a storm into the night of their new life.