Two Cousins

As spring commenced in 1973 Tehran, I met an interesting creature while walking a side street off of Sultanatabad Avenue at dawn. Calmly eating a bit of grain in a small alcove, the little beauty didn't flee when I approached. Speaking softly as I crouched, it watched me with large, aware eyes, its tall ears twitching this way and that, listening to noises I was making. I did my best to move quietly and to remain calm. In return, the Jerboa remained calm as well.

Everything about it was exquisite, and as it watched me watching it, I wondered what things it had witnessed along the various kooches of the neighborhood. Stirring about in the seeds littering its little safe place in the low stone retaining wall, it found another one to munch on.

Something about the encounter at such a still, early hour of morning in that strange, foreign land seemed to make time and space quake ever so slightly. Springtime was making me ultra sensitive to sights, sounds, aromas, and less tangible sensations. I was restless, wanting to move, to explore the vastness of reality in and around Tehran from every angle, up close and intently. No one and nothing else stirred along the length of the kooche. Time lost all meaning. Sighing in superb contentment with the moment, we watched each other closely. I knew nothing about Iranian Jerboa at that time beyond what I was observing and absorbing in that eternal instant of timelessness, all alone on the kooche with the little desert creature.

A year later, the Bonneville's engine hummed a low, mechanical mantra that seemed to vibrate the very atoms of the red dirt beneath my booted feet. I leaned closer to the tiny rodent spotted mere moments before I'd have driven right over it, my glasses slipping down my nose a bit, until I was mere inches from its liquid-black eyes. Depthless, serene, piercing.

Those eyes weren't reflecting the station wagon's high beams at all, which seemed odd. Fathomless, the eyes sucked in the harsh light and curdled any reflection that might have emerged. 1974 was a warm glowing time for me as I basked in sensations of being back on home soil after having returned from Iran the previous summer, striving to become an adult.

A Texas Kangaroo Rat, fairly rare for that region. Through the tiny lens of the creature's cornea, I saw a shadow of skyline I knew well after months scanning it from the roof of the house on Kooche Kaj, but the skyline was too ragged, marked by fire and rising smoke: The Milad Tower, fractured and leaning against a blackness choked with oily rain. I saw high-altitude flash of a kinetic strike over the Pasdaran district, blooming like a poisonous flower in the dark. The district long ago repurposed for the nations military people and machinery, it was under attack for no good reason beyond a wannabe dictator's vicious, hateful scheme.

The superposition was absolute. My eighteen-year-old hands, heavily calloused from labor on wildcat rigs punching holes across former Comancheria territory, felt the sudden, phantom chill of a 70-year-old's grief. I wasn't just looking at a desert survivor in Greer County; I was looking into a prismatic portal across the multiverse. The diminutive mammal remained a statue of fur, flesh and bone, a biological constant holding the two points of my life—the Oklahoma Breaks and the burning streets of Tehran—in a singular, agonizing focus.

Then and there became a translucent layer. Through the red dust carpeting of that rural road, I saw ruins of a café near Sultanatabad. The smell of hot oil from the station wagon mingled with ozone of a distant, future energy facility bombardment which was inevitable after the wannabe dictator had returned to its over-shielded position of power. Still just a boy in peacoat and welder's cap staring at a probable end of my own history, the little prairie creature just blinked, its metabolic secrets of survival the only thing keeping the timeline from dissolving into the vacuum, speaking to me of what I must do henceforth to survive too.

Replying softly, I mentioned meeting its cousin in Tehran the previous spring during a time of peace and prosperity there. It didn't react, remaining motionless, feeling human menace.

Wondering when the convicted felon in the White House will drop troops on ground in Iran, I can feel time and space quaking yet again, wishing I were as fleet legged as the two cousins.