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sulfurousdreamscapes · 5 years ago

Text

Parts 8/8 complete.

Another record-breaking story for Sulfurous Dreamscapes! I'm really proud of the concept behind this one, and I'm keen to develop it as a WIP in the future.

Until then, feel free to read this short story treatment!

What: Girl finds man in a battle suit, who has been in a coma for 30 years.

How long: 5,500 words

Genre: Sci-fi

CW: War mention

Usually when something moves in the junkyard, it’s a rat or a wounded dog. This time, it was something else, and it was crushing the plastic and metal around it. Jodie and I were frozen with spray paint cans in our hands. The movement was just outside the light, so most of what we saw was our imagination, really.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, but Jodie shook her head.

“Wait,” she said and shook her can out of habit.

The heap of junk slid around, crunched, bent, dented and turned over. Jodie moved towards the heap, still shaking her can like it was pepper spray or something. I followed her, and I wondered if tonight was the night I was going to pull out my knife. Even Jodie didn’t know I carried a knife with me.

Jodie turned halfway towards me. “It’s a battle suit,” she said. “Hear the steps? It’s definitely a battle suit.”

“Let’s definitely get out of here,” I whispered back, but Jodie shook her head again. Instead she pulled a flashlight out of her pack and held it in her free hand.

As soon as the light clicked on, we saw the thing clearly. Grey metal, rusty and scratched all over, a humanoid battle suit maybe seven feet tall, crushing the garbage beneath it like it was walking on cardboard. There were no lights on it, not even tiny leds.

“Who the fuck is in it?” Jodie asked me. “That thing looks like it’s 30 years old. How is it even moving?”

“I wonder if its weapons still work,” I said. Jodie gave me a death stare and I shrugged in response.

The battle suit finally found level ground and was able to walk with more stability. One of its arms was limp, and its head was struggling to turn left and right.

“Maybe it’s a robot?” I asked. “I’ve never seen this model before.”

“If you saw this model, you’d be dead,” the battle suit said. Its voice was hoarse and thin, clearly of an elderly man.

“I don’t think it’s a robot,” Jodie said, turning halfway again. “They don’t give robots old-man voices.”

The battle suit raised its working hand and held a clenched fist pointed at us.

We waited.

“I think it wants us to give it a fist bump,” I said.

“They wrecked it pretty hard,” the battle suit man said. “I can’t prime my offensive systems. I can’t connect to the defence net. My arm is busted. I can’t move right. This is a fucking travesty.”

Jodie walked up to the battle suit, shaking her spray can as she went. “Last defence net shut down thirteen years ago, boss,” she said.

“What the heck is a defence net?” I asked from behind her.

The battle suit man grunted and lowered his arm. “It’s over, isn’t it? The war is over,” the man said. “I remember staring at the sky while pain surged through my body. I thought it was over for me, but a part of me said that the suit would keep me alive. I guess it did.”

Jodie whistled and stopped in front of the metal giant. “Didn’t think they had life support in battle suits that old,” she said. “I guess we keep underestimating history.”

She raised her spray can began showering the rusty metal with bubblegum pink paint. The man in the suit stood still, like he was receiving a medal.

“The war ended like, thirty years ago,” Jodie said. “You probably wanna get out of that clunker now.”

The battle suit man didn’t say anything. If it weren’t for the breathing picked up by his mic, I’d have thought he was dead.

“Wondering what happened to your friends and family, huh?” Jodie shook her head as she curved the spraying. “I guess you don’t want to find out.”

After she was done, she stood back to admire her work and shook the can some more.

It was a peace sign in glossy pink, emblazoned across the battle suit’s chest.

Everyone in the bus stared at us in the back, especially the kids, who stood on their seats and held onto backs of their seats. Jodie was reading a magazine, the kind with an oiled, nearly-naked person on the cover. I was trying to keep my attention out of the window. Meanwhile, the man in the battle suit sat with his right hand on his knee and his unlit gaze staring straight through the middle of the bus.

After Jodie was done with her magazine, she sighed extravagantly and stared at each of the passengers until they stopped looking at us.

“You should have a name,” Jodie said as she slapped her hand on the metal thigh. It was a pretty hard slap, you could tell from the sound.

“Jamshid,” the reply came.

Jamshid raised his right arm as if to slap Jodie’s thigh. She and I sat frozen, our eyes on the metal hand. A few seconds later, Jamshid put it back on his knee. “I thought it would be funny,” he said.

Our bus stop was in an underpass with graffiti and broken bricks. I identified some of the graffiti as Jodie’s handiwork, but it was my first time in that part of town.

“How far is she?” I asked, pulling out transparent slab of plastic that showed me a map of the area. Jamshid took a few steps closer to me, clearly looking at the map with interest.

“Not far,” Jodie said. “She’ll be super interested in the battle suit. She’s a collector of retro hardware, and a suit like this from the war… yeah, I think she’s gonna waive the repair fee on my bike.”

“And she can get Jamshid out of his suit?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she shrugged.

“That’s not what you said before,” Jamshid growled. “You said you know someone who can get me out of this suit.”

Jodie ran a hand over her peace sign handiwork on the chest of Jamshid’s suit. “I mean, it’s worth a shot,” she said. “What other option do you have? It’s not like we’re going to find the manufacturer warranty.”

“Take me to a military base,” Jamshid said.

“Yeah well, the military isn’t going to fix my bike for free, man,” Jodie shook her head. “And we’re not your mommies, you’re free to go if you think the military’s going to help you. If you lose us, though, I don’t know if you’ll ever find someone who can pull you out of that tin can.”

“The suit stays mine,” Jamshid grunted. “It’s not yours to sell.”

“That’s a lot of demands from someone who doesn’t even know if he can get out of his metal action figure,” Jodie snapped back. “Maybe you should just keep your suit with its limp arm and paralysed turning.”

I sighed and got between the two of them. “Can you two just relax? Let’s just get to Roohi and see what she has to say.”

Jodie and Jamshid stayed quiet from there as we entered the narrower alleys lined by street merchants and stray dogs. As in the bus, everyone had their eyes on the battle suit. And me? I had my knife.

Roohi loved the colour orange so much that she hung fake oranges and marigolds outside her door, her windows were stained orange, her walls were painted varying shades of orange, and the little glass mirrors on her bead curtains all reflected an orange juice reality.

As soon as you stepped into her place, it felt like you were on a different planet, or some kind of oddly colour-graded movie. Jamshid moved his battle-suited body a lot as he stared at the orange walls and the orange paper butterflies and the orange beads.

“Why is everything orange?” he asked as Jodie went to fetch Roohi.

“From what Jodie told me, it’s because Roohi’s father once gave each calendar month a colour, and Roohi’s birthday falls on the month marked ‘orange’. So she just kind of owned it,” I said.

“I’d get sick of it,” he said, but then he followed my gaze and turned around to find Jodie and Roohi enter the room.

Roohi whistled.

“When the hell did you learn to whistle?” Jodie asked her.

“A week ago,” Roohi laughed. “I had to modify the code a bit to have it work with my shell, but…” She whistled a tune from a popular song.

Jodie was carrying wrenches and screwdrivers in her hands, which she clattered onto a table that was already crowded by cables and hardware. As she went in to fetch more, Roohi’s wheels rolled forwards. Her digitised face looked intrigued while her periscope camera inspected the battle suit closely.

“Enki Original, oooh” she cooed. “This is a rare one. They had these imported, but very few were actually made. See, the acquisition was a hassle—corruption at every bureaucratic level, you know how it is. They got a few in, but most of the units that saw battle were Enki-Hydras. I didn’t know any of these Original models existed, let alone see battle.”

“There were several,” Jamshid said while Jodie reappeared and dumped more tools in. “They are hard to control, and only the best pilots could be trusted with them.”

“Yeah!” Roohi’s face lit up and her screen was crowded with happy emojis and hearts. “I’ve read that they had production issues, so they had to use off-the-market stabilisers and magnets. Again, corruption and stuff, you know how it is.”

Jodie leaned against the table, drenched in orange like the rest of us, and she put a hand on Roohi’s metal, egg-shaped shell. “We’re hoping to get our pal Jamshid out of his battle suit. Can you do it?”

Jamshid took a step forward with a clenched metal fist. “Get me out,” he said, grimly and resolutely. Militarily.

“Uh,” Roohi said, and didn’t say anything more for a while. We waited in what looked like the cabin of a sunk ship in an orange sea. “Okay, so, there’s no manuals for this kind of hardware. And they didn’t have standardised armouring systems back then, so you can only get this battle suit off at a very specific armouring station. I have no idea where you’d begin to find one for Enki Originals.”

Jamshid grunted and turned for the door. “I should’ve gone for the military first,” he said.

“Sorry, man,” Roohi said. Her screen made a disappointed face, the kind with a slanted line for a mouth. “I guess they could have one, but it’s still a long shot. You know how it is.”

Jodie began talking to Roohi about her bike, but I touched Jamshid’s arm. I couldn’t see a speck of emotion on his metal face, not even a flicker of light where his eyes were marked.

“It’s going to be alright,” I said. “We’ll find the military. We’ll get help for you.”

“It was alright,” he barked. “For 30 years, it was alright. It was all alright until I woke up.”

It took so long for the clerk to return from the archives room that I counted six different pencil-pushers finish their coffees. The entire time, Jamshid stood at attention, staring straight at the wooden door with the translucent window. I was on the verge of getting physically sick from all the bureaucracy.

“Did you say your last name was Nurzai?” the records clerk asked, stacking up the papers against the table.

“Yes,” Jamshid said. His breath caught his name with a slight hesitation, as if he were receiving a misplaced family heirloom.

“I’m not seeing anyone with that name, sorry,” the clerk said.

I leaned over her desk and frowned in her face. “Come on, check those papers, I’m pretty sure he’s there somewhere.”

The clerk clenched her fist like she wanted to knock me out. “These papers are not related to your case. We do more work at the Veteran’s Service Office than just…” she eyed me and Jamshid suspiciously. “Whatever it is you are doing.”

“N-o-o-r-z-a-i,” Jamshid said. “Try that spelling.”

The clerk sighed and spent a few precious seconds flattening the dog-ear crease at the corner of a document. Then she got up and disappeared behind the door marked ‘Archives’ again.

I checked the time. Jamshid waited. The ceiling fan creaked, and more cups of coffee were placed empty on glass desks. I hadn’t had any sleep in hours, and I half wanted to swipe everything on the clerk’s table to the floor, get on the desk, curl up, and sleep.

“You should get some sleep,” Jamshid grunted and turned 90 degrees to stop me from crashing on the desk, all with his right hand. “You’re getting tired. A tired body is a weak body.”

I glared at him, but it was no use. There was nothing to glare at, just a bunch of metal and more metal.

The door squeaked open, and the clerk brought exactly one page in her hands. It was yellowed and splotchy, and the edges were weathered. She placed it on her desk, right where my butt could have been, and traced the record with her finger.

“Enki Original?” she asked, looking up at Jamshid and then me. “It says here that Upper Tech Sergeant Noorani was killed in action. This is the date of death, location and time of engagement, date of notifications sent to family… all accounted for.”

“He wasn’t killed in action,” I said, feeling a new surge of waking. “He was injured and in coma for 30 years. His suit kept him alive, and he only recovered consciousness now.”

The clerk pursed her lips. “Did you memorise that?”

“Excuse me?” I leaned in close to her.

The clerk jabbed at the paper. “It says here that he is _dead_. Unless this individual you claim can prove that they are the same recruit as on record, we cannot make any amends or provide any support.”

“How the fuck is he supposed to prove that?” I asked. The office hushed and turned to face me. Moustaches and old hairstyles with fake pearl necklaces. I refocused attention on the clerk.

“Well, we would require biometric proof, such as fingerprints or retinal scans… those work the best as ID proofs.”

“He’ll need to get out of his armour to get fingerprints and retinal scans, lady,” I said. “Getting out of his suit is the reason we came to you in the first place. I mean come on, you’re the military, right? You guys _put_ him in his suit in the first place, and now you won’t let him out?”

The clerk groaned and rested her head on a fist. “Please approach me with the required documentation and I will move forward with your request.” Her voice was droning now. She looked like she wanted to lay on the desk and go to sleep herself.

They wouldn’t let Jamshid into the diner, so I had him wait outside while it rained. I got myself a chicken wrap and got out again to stand by him. He saw me fumbling with the umbrella while holding the wrap, and he offered to hold the umbrella for me. I said my thanks with a mouth full of spicy chicken.

“You don’t ever get hungry?” I asked him while we watched the cars cut through the water-glazed streets.

“I don’t,” he said. The way he said it, it was like he’d interrupted himself from saying ‘I don’t know’. He paused for a few moments. “I don’t feel hungry. I guess the suit injects me with suppressants.”

I shrugged. “That’s rough. But maybe not, I guess. It is sad, though, that you can’t eat.”

“Why is that sad?” he asked. I watched his armour glow in passing headlights, as if it was flaming torches passing us by.

“It feels good, my dude,” I said. “Just like cuddling, I guess. Or what everyone says sex is supposed to feel like. It’s just the most basic thing that feels good to anyone, that’s eating for you. You won’t ever hear anyone in the world say they hate eating. It’s like lying down after a really, really, tired day.”

I was expecting him to say something, but I ended up listening to the patter of the rain like it was call hold music.

Then I got it.

“Well, shit,” I said. “You can’t do any of those things now, can you? I’m sorry.”

“Your friend, Roohi,” Jamshid asked unexpectedly. “Was she… is she… well, is she a real person? Or is she a robot?”

“Oh, she’s not my friend,” I reacted as I reached the bottom of my chicken wrap. “She’s Jodie’s friend, really, and even then, not so much. They’ve known each other for a long time, maybe even since Jodie was a kid.”

“So she was in a shell? Even then?” Jamshid asked.

I paused tantalisingly close to gobbling up the last morsel of the wrap. “You know, I never thought to ask,” I said. “Maybe she was? I never really thought about any of that—whether she grew up human, or if she’s always been in a shell. I just thought she was cool.”

“Maybe she grew up human and had a very serious injury and she had to be put into that thing,” Jamshid said.

I finished the wrap and crumbled the paper cover that came with it. “Maybe she was born in a computer lab and all the memories she has of her father and his calender of colours—all that is just a script written by some imaginative intern. They’re both just as valid.”

“They’re not,” Jamshid said. Like before, he seemed to have stopped himself from saying any more. This time, he seemed to be reconsidering what he had just said.

“I’m gonna get another one, with sweet onion sauce this time,” I said, and returned to the diner.

Inside, most of the tables were empty and the few patrons there were loners. The woman behind the counter looked a lot more pleasantly at me than before, probably that I’d given her no trouble.

I placed my order and drummed my fingers against the counter, leaning back and forth to the rhythm of the music in the diner. My pocket buzzed, and I pulled out my phone to find Jodie’s face plastered on it with a toothy grin.

“You coming to the 'yard tonight?” she asked.

“Nah, I’m hanging with Jamshid,” I said.

“Still?” she groaned and cursed under her breath. “He isn’t a dog, you know. You don’t have to take care of him.”

“I know,” I said, but I didn’t have anything to qualify my position. “But he’s cool. I want to help him see his… I don’t know, his quest through.”

“His quest?” Jodie laughed and cursed at the same time. “You’re a slut for charity.”

“Did you get your bike back?” I asked.

“Nah, Roohi is being a hard ass,” she groaned again. “Says your new friend wasn’t good enough. Says 'What am I supposed to do with this? Money don’t grow on trees!’ and other bullshit. I mean come on.”

“Tough luck,” I said. “Maybe if you hadn’t wrecked it.”

Jodie chuckled. “Girl, that bike has a destiny of its own. It doesn’t matter if I wrecked it or not, it was just destined to get wrecked at that time of its life. You know what I mean?”

“I know that my chicken wrap is here.” I smiled and waved cutely before cutting the call.

The lady approached the counter and handed me by wrap while I swiped the payment on my phone.

“Nothing for your friend there?” she asked, nodding at the door.

“He doesn’t eat,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “A robot?”

I raised a middle finger at her and left the diner with my wrap.

“So how different is the city from when you last saw it?” I asked. The robot-pulled rickshaw slid cleanly by the edge of the street. It was heavy, but at least the robot wouldn’t complain about a man in a battle suit.

“This isn’t the same city,” Jamshid said. “Not anymore.”

“After the war, the city changed a lot.” I felt a bump under the wheels of the rickshaw. “So much was damaged, they had to practically rebuild the city anew. Lots of people died, too, so they had to bring it immigrants from all over. Jodie’s parents were immigrants—but you probably figured that out already.”

“It used to be more beautiful back then,” Jamshid said. “Quieter, greener. People dressed decently, talked decently.”

“Declared war decently,” I added, and Jamshid scoffed under his helmet.

“I don’t recognise any of these streets,” he said. “Is this where you live? I don’t think this district even existed back then.”

“Nah, this one is pretty old,” I told him. “Perch, if you’ve heard of it.”

“Perch,” Jamshid said, almost like a machine hiss. “Parrot’s Perch. My family used to live in Parrot’s Perch.”

I turned to face the metal man. “No kidding?” I grinned. “Where? Maybe I know the place.”

Jamshid recited his address: a number, a building name, a street, a main street, a neighbourhood, a wider area, and finally, ‘Parrot’s Perch’. It was like he was reading off of a piece of paper in front of him.

“Uh yeah, none of those are ringing any bells,” I said. “But then they renamed all the streets after the war, and some places, too. I mean, you call it Parrot’s Perch, I call it just the Perch.”

“Kozue. That was an alcohol shop downstairs,” he mumbled. “And a bakery across the street. What was that name? Foragers’ Bakes. Funny name. Funny story behind it, too.”

I input the names he was mentioning into the Map and did not find any hits. The shop names were a bust, but I did find the street names in a database online. Navigating the old website for useful information was a mess, and I was really ticked off, but I finally found the name I was looking for.

“I found it. No liquor shop or bakery on there, but well…”

“Which way is it?” Jamshid asked with a tone of slight urgency.

“To the left from here, and then straight, taking another left by the bend,” I said.

“You heard her, rickshaw-bot,” Jamshid barked, and the robot recited an acknowledgement before turning to the left, down a street I’d seen a few times before.

“Maybe there’s someone in the area who knows your family. Someone old enough,” I said.

Jamshid held onto the steel railing in front of it. He gripped it so tightly, I was worried he’d damage the rickshaw. “I just want to see what it’s like now,” he said. His voice was a lot less convincing than it had been before.

We took the left at the bend, and as soon as the rickshaw stopped, Jamshid got up and jumped off. I swiped a payment and got down as well.

Jamshid stared at the mega-supermarket that spanned almost the entire length of the street. Shopping carts rattled and shoppers walked out with sodas and beers, clutching their precious bags of chips. Jamshid kept walking down the street, his angle seemingly ignoring the supermarket next to him. Finally, he found a really, really old fire hydrant. Jodie doesn’t even know what a fire hydrant is.

“Do you recognise it?” I asked.

“I’ve seen enough,” he grunted, and turned around before marching back from where we came.

When my parents are away for a while, I like to sleep on the roof. There’s no bed there, so I carry a thick mattress up. Jamshid helped carry it for me. I tossed the pillow onto one end and stretched myself under a black-orange sky. If you looked hard enough, you could see a star or two.

“Do you regret all this?” I asked. “Getting into the suit and all… I’d regret it.”

“I knew the risks,” Jamshid replied. He was looking at the city… or what would be seen of it, given that we didn’t exactly live in a high-rise.

“Did you?” I leaned back and looked at him with my head upside-down. “Did you know you’d be trapped in the suit for 30 years because of a coma?”

Jamshid sighed dryly. “No, I didn’t know that,” he said.

“What did you know? What did they tell you?”

“I’d read the literature,” he said. “I thought I’d be invincible. Hits that could kill a man would just be scratches on metal for me. It was supposed to be really quick, too. Forty minutes, that’s it. They didn’t want to tax these things too much that early.”

“Forty minutes?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jamshid said. “And five of those would be assembly and disassembly. It was a quick engagement, and we were the cavalry. A special surprise just when the enemy thought they had us on the run.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, we won,” I said.

“Of course we did,” Jamshid said. “We knew that even back then. The enemy never really had a chance, but they fought fiercely. I thought I’d be back at the base in an hour. I’d be eating sausages in the mess. That hour never really ended for me.”

I watched a tiny black insect crawl along the surface of the rood, tiny antennas feeling twitching and searching. It scampered away when my phone began vibrating with a call. It was Jodie again. I swiped yes.

“Hey, Roohi wanted to talk to you about your new dad,” Jodie said, and handed her phone to Roohi’s metal arm.

“Hey honey,” Roohi greeted me. Her voice sounded less electronic, somehow. “I was wondering if your friend is still with you. I couldn’t help but get curious, and I wanted to know if I could find out more about him.”

“What can you find out about him?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” Roohi laughed. “Anything. I just wanna go digging.”

“Jodie’s that boring, huh?” I asked, and Roohi laughed for half a minute straight. I got up with the phone and walked up to Jamshid. “What do you wanna know?”

“Could you check his serial number, honey?” Roohi asked. “Should be somewhere on his chest, over where his heart should be.”

I scanned his chest. It took a while as I asked Roohi what to look for, and she told me what to look for, and I finally found what I was looking for. A small metal plate, the side of maybe three of my fingers. It had a serial number, a model number, and a bar code of some sort. Below that were the initials of the armed forces. The pink paint had narrowly missed the plate. Any further to the right, and it would be gone.

I took a picture of the plate and sent it to Roohi, who cut the line after a very curt thanks.

“Roohi’s gonna dig up what she can about you,” I told Jamshid, who just grunted. “Maybe she can find out something that could get you out of there.”

“Please don’t,” he said, and laid his working hand on the chain link around the roof’s edge.

“You don’t want to get out of there?” I asked.

“I don’t want to think about getting out,” he replied. “Because then I have to think about not getting out.”

I nodded and looked at the floor for a while. “But you know,” I said. “That’s the same as not thinking about success, because then you have to think about failure. If you do that, you’ll never be successful.”

“I don’t want to be successful,” he said. “I just want to not fail.”

Before I could respond, he held up his hand at me, making a stop gesture. I shoved my hands in my pyjama pockets.

My phone buzzed again, and I picked up the call.

“So this was kind of hard, given how fucking awful government websites are,” Roohi said without any greetings. “But I’ve got his name, rank, posting, origin. I did a few more searches, and I found his family, too. I know where they live now.”

I looked up at Jamshid. “Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, still staring out at the city.

The van-cab ride blew a chunk of my account balance, but I figured this was going to be worth it. I wasn't going to make Jamshid ride a bus to see his own family. On the way, we stopped at a record store. He made me buy a very old record called "Midnight Flight". The cab driver was a little annoyed we took so long, but I guess he didn't want to complain to a customer in a battle suit.

Jamshid held the record in front of him in the van, reading the back of the sleeve. I tapped my foot to a song that Jamshid would never have heard of. The blip on the map drew closer and closer to its destination.

"You must be nervous," I said.

Jamshid lowered the record from between us. "Are you going to stay out?"

I hadn't expected that, so I gave it some thought.

"What do you want me to do?" I finally asked.

"I don't know," he said, and his voice was a lot weaker than it usually is. "I don't even know what I want to do."

The van pulled over and the driver pulled the doors open. He was grinning under his spiky moustache. "You know, I mostly carry cargo. A real, flesh-and-blood person in a battle suit? Can't say I ever imagined that."

"Thank you for the ride," Jamshid said as he got out.

The alley we had to pass through was so cramped that we had to walk one behind the other. Jamshid's battle suit barely squeezed through, and there was still a fair bit of scratching on the sides. Wires hung from above, carrying data and power, and the tiles below were broken, some even before Jamshid stepped on them.

After some asking around, we found the address. The door looked like it could fall off any minute. A bunch of boys sitting on bikes nearby eyed us, splitting their attention between me and Jamshid. Crows took turns watching us.

I rang the doorbell.

We waited.

The door opened to reveal a woman wiping her hands on a rag. She was squinting at first, but that turned into an alarmed frown when she saw Jamshid's battle suit. "Who are you?"

"This is Jamshid Noorzai," I said. "You're his family."

The woman half-turned back and yelled out a name, and mentioned that there's a man in a battle suit at the door. Multiple sets of feet shuffled inside. The first out were a pair of kids: both girls, mouths agape and looking at Jamshid like he was a god.

An older woman appeared from inside. Her hair looked like white cotton candy, and she wore a rather cheap gown. She wore the kind of eyeglasses that have a thin chain on them.

Jamshid made a sound, and his breathing was loud enough for all of us to hear.

The older woman was also frowning as she made her way to us, and the younger woman stepped aside, herding the kids away. The older woman grimaced at us while she squinted for a better look through her eyeglasses.

"Who are you two? What do you want?" she asked.

I repeated what I had said to the younger woman before.

The woman looked a little angry now, a little disgusted, like I'd made a profane joke about a dead person. She could've eaten my head clean off. "There is no Jamshid Noorzai," she said. "He died three decades ago."

"I got you this," Jamshid said, lifting his record, making sure the front cover was facing the woman. "Happy birthday, sis."

The older woman stared at the record and the anger and the disgust faded away, washed away by her watering eyes. Her head shook a little. She looked up at Jamshid.

"I guess I missed thirty birthdays," he said. "But this is what you wanted first, so I got it for you, just like I said I would."

"Jamshid?" the woman asked. Her voice was choked, and the tears were breaking through now.

"We'll figure out the other twenty-nine birthday gifts later, right?" Jamshid said.

The woman took a few steps closer, and she embraced the battle suit, pressing her head against the peace sign on the chest. Her tears flowed down the metal. When she began crying, it was like her voice was being snapped in half each time.

Jamshid placed his working hand on her back and pressed her against him. "I told you, didn't I?" he said. "I told you I wasn't lying. I told you I'd really come back, and I'd bring the record with me. It just took me a while, that's all."

I wiped the tears off my own eyes. The younger woman touched my shoulder. "Why don't you sit? Would you like something to drink?"

I hugged her.

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