Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran, Iran and grew up in Seattle.  He lives in San Francisco and writes as well as works at a school as a tutor.  He loves short stories but hopes to also write novels and plays.

Vossoughi says: "I think I got the idea for this story because no matter what I do or experience or write, listening has always been very important to me.  That and the fact that I really did play on the University of Washington Ultimate Frisbee team."

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Where I Come From, People Listen

by Siamak Vossoughi

One day a guy brings a Frisbee to school, and then he and his friends are throwing it around at lunch, and then pretty soon they're playing a game with it that they're not sure they learned about or invented, and then next thing you know, they've graduated from high school and gone to college, and that is how I found myself on the University of Washington Ultimate Frisbee team, the only brown fellow on a team of white graduate students.  Not that I knew at the time what that meant.

     The game itself was beautiful.  There was grass and running and diving and all along I was making a study of how the gray sky over Seattle could look so magnificent, even when it was dark and what some people would call gloomy.  I was beginning to think that it had to do with what was happening on the ground.  The people on the ground had some say in whether it was gloomy or not.

     The players themselves were more like who I had hoped to meet in college.  They had something slow and unrushed about them, and who they were seemed to take in more than just the school and the party over the weekend.  The team was co-ed and the men and women were easy around each other, like the world of men and women didn't have to be so hard after all.

     Every other Saturday, I would go home and while I was studying up in my old room, my sister would come in and tell me about life in seventh grade.  It was a relief to hear that somebody was struggling with life besides me.  It was the same old stuff:  People and what were they trying to do in being how they were and what was anybody supposed to do about it.  It was a seventh-grade version of it, but that was where she happened to be.  She didn't have any other version of it to speak from.  I'd listen to her and the grey sky would do that thing it did again, and I'd feel even more sure that it had to do with the people on the ground.

     The Frisbee team would practice on Fridays, and on the way back from the field, they would stop off at Big Time Brewery, a pub that I dreamed of some day entering.  But I was too young and they were strict about I.D., so I would walk home with Laura Cary, the ex-girlfriend of the team captain, Mike Tunica.  She told me she felt okay to play Frisbee with him but not to drink around him, and when she said it, life seemed wonderful and mysterious.

     On the way home, she would tell me about her and Mike.  She started telling it and I listened, so I guess she decided to tell some more.  She wasn't desperate about it.  She had already given her feelings a lot of consideration.  She had given the relationship a lot of consideration, and the chance for reconciliation.  Still, I knew her and I knew Mike, so I was somebody to tell.

     I could see how the whole thing could be difficult, since they were still on the same team.  She saw all the little things she liked about him and all the little things she didn't like.  I liked listening to her a lot.  I liked the difficulties of feelings.  I liked complexity.  It felt like something that matched the grey sky in the afternoon, the way it was something that nobody was supposed to like but somehow I did.  I would've been happy just to go on one date at the time, but the language she spoke wasn't unfamiliar to me.  It was something I had always thought people had in them, all this time in my first year of college that I had been walking around the campus looking at the hundreds and hundreds of them.  It turned out that here was where they had it: in their relationships.  It was as good a place as any.  They were geniuses in it when they were given a chance.  Laura Cary was at least, I thought.  She knew every little part of him that brought her close and pushed her away, and she knew how it was mixed up with a real struggle of who he was and who he was trying to be.  How do you ever really know one way or the other when it comes to human beings, she was asking.  That's a good goddamn question, I wanted to say.

     We got into a routine on Fridays after practice, and I looked forward to it as much as the playing itself.  She was twenty-four years old and when she told me about her relationship with Mike, I felt like I was going past the school and to the world, which was all I was trying to do all the time.

     At one practice, Mike and I were warming up together, tossing short throws.  He jogged over to me.

     "Sorry about Laura," he said.

     "What do you mean?" I said.

     "She's been talking your ear off about us."

     "It's all right."

     "You can tell her you're not her therapist, you know.  She's probably right about everything she says about me, but if you're getting tired of it, you should tell her."

     "It's all right," I said.  "Where I come from, people listen."

     Sometimes people surprise you.  When I said it, the words sounded forceful, but the way I said it did not.  Anyway I didn't mean anything against him by it and he seemed to know that right away.

     "Where do you mean?"

     I didn't know.  I had just felt that I wanted to say it.

     "Iran" I said.

     "Iran?  How long did you live there?"

     "Until I was two."

     He looked at me like he didn't know what to say and we went back to throwing.  I didn't know where else it was that I meant but I made a mental note to think about it some more later.

     Laura had to leave early that day because of a sprained ankle, but the next week when she and I were walking home again, she said, "I don't mean to be taking advantage of you if there's some cultural reasons why you feel obligated to listen to me.  You can tell me if you're tired of hearing about me and Mike."

     "That's the thing," I said.  "I don't know if there is or not.  But I really don't mind hearing about it.  I like listening to you."

     "Thank you."

     "I have a question though.  What exactly are you supposed to do if you don't listen?"

     "It is nice to hear you say that."

     At the next practice, Mike was warming up with me again.

     "I'm going to say something that is going to sound very mean, but I am going to say it," he said.  "You are going down a dangerous road.  You are going down a dangerous road listening to women."

     "I am?"

     "Yes."

     I knew where he was going with it:  There are the young men that women talk to and there are the young men that they go home with at night, and they are not the same young men.  Even back then, I knew that there were young men all over who were being told this theory, and I felt sorry for every one of them, American or Iranian.  Which didn't mean that Mike might not be right about it.  It was just that not listening to women felt like a dangerous road too, and I felt inclined to go with the danger that felt less dangerous at least.

     "How come you and Laura manage to find a way to talk about me but not about each other?" I said.

     "Well it's different.  We like you."

     "You like each other."

     "We like each other, but we don't like that third thing that's just sitting there.  Everything that we have to talk about.  I don't at least."

     I liked people for having those third things, as hard as they were.  They went a long way in making them who they were.  Laura happened to bring it up to the surface and Mike happened to push it under, but they were both struggling with it.  I liked the way people couldn't pretend like they weren't there.  I spent a lot of time in those days thinking about what made people different from each other, and it was very nice to think about what they had in common.

    "Well," I said.  "It's not going anywhere."

     The next day I went home and when my sister came up to my room while I was studying, I told her about the Frisbee team and walking home with Laura and everything that Mike had had to say about it.  I told her the part about listening to women because this was the world she was in and I figured she might as well hear about it now.  She listened the whole time and then she told me about seventh grade and what her friends had been saying that she didn't like about some other people.  I listened and wondered if our listening could be from Iran when all we did was speak in English and all we talked about was trying to understand people here in America.  It was still possible.  Maybe it was like reporting back to each other, because along with discovering life, we were both discovering a world that was different from our life at home.

     But it was also from itself, I knew that much too.  It was from itself because there really were some parts of life that moved in a straight line, as impossible as that seemed, and you learned from them as you were doing them.  You might even learn word by word, as it was in our case.  It sounded precarious when I thought of it like that, but not if my sister and I were both doing it.

     It was the same thing with the sky over Seattle.  It was beautiful because it had other grey skies in it, all the grey skies I had seen in Seattle, which meant that it had me in it, it had more of me in it than a sunny day would, because the biggest thing I believed in without actually knowing it in those days was that what was actually happening was bigger than anything I wished was happening, and I didn't know how to tell anybody that, even my sister.  I didn't know how to tell anybody that when Laura Cary was telling me about her problems with Mike Tunica, it was bigger than anybody I could wish was telling me about anything.  But it was why I couldn't get behind it when there was a feeling in people on a sunny day that everything they were waiting for was finally here.  I hadn't been a fool on those other days.  I hadn't been half-paying attention to life.  There had been worlds and lives affected by those other days, and my only wish was to know about every one.