Darius the Great Is Not Okay

Darius wakes up at three o’clock in the morning with a massive pimple on his forehead, which he pops. He begins packing one of his father’s messenger bags, which he’s borrowed to use as a carry-on; Stephen scolds his son when he sees he didn’t finish packing the night before. Along with his schoolwork, medication, and passport, Darius packs The Lord of the Rings and a tin of specialty tea to give Mamou.

The family arrives at the airport at 4:30 a.m., where Darius is subjected to an enhanced screening. He tells the officer where he’s going, nervously blurting out that his grandfather has a brain tumor. Before letting him go, the officer comments on Darius’s pimple, which he mistakes for a bindi. Darius, who has privately nicknamed the pimple Olympus Mons after the mountain on Mars, awkwardly corrects him, and the officer laughs.

The Kellners fly to New York and then to Dubai, crossing eleven time zones in total. Laleh spends much of the latter flight asking questions about Iran, heightening Darius’s own anxiety about what to expect. After Laleh falls asleep, Darius’s mother alerts him to the fact that people in Iran might not know what to make of his depression; she also confides that she’s nervous about returning too.

At the Dubai airport, Darius’s mother suggests having dinner, and Laleh immediately asks to go to Subway. Darius hides in the bathroom while the rest of his family eats; he associates Subway with an old job he hated, and he’s further put off when his father questions why he doesn’t order something with vegetables. As he returns to the table, he overhears his mother arguing with his father, saying that making Darius feel “ashamed of everything” won’t help him (60); Darius’s father denies that this is what he’s doing, insisting that he just wants to spare Darius the added stress of bullying when he’s already living with depression.

When Darius sits down, his mother takes Laleh to the bathroom to clean up. His father tries to apologize and reassure Darius that he loves him, but Darius remains on edge. He stays awake during the flight to Tehran, which is a half-hour ahead of Dubai. As the plane approaches the city in the early morning hours, Darius’s mother puts headscarves on herself and Laleh and smiles reassuringly at Darius.

At Customs, an officer briefly questions Darius’s parents about the nature of their visit and then allows the family to proceed. However, a second officer stops Darius and orders him to accompany him to a small room. Here, Darius nervously responds to the officer’s questions, reminded of a Star Trek episode where Captain Picard is captured, interrogated, and psychologically tortured. The officer also goes through Darius’s bag, scoffing when Darius explains that the medication is for depression: “I hated that question: What are you depressed about? Because the answer was nothing” (68). However, when Darius explains that his father is an architect, the officer lights up and begins talking about all of the buildings in Iran the family should visit.

After the officer lets Darius go, he finds himself wanting to talk to his father about the experience: “I wanted […] to tell Dad about my interrogation and how there really were four lights [like in the Star Trek episode]” (70). Instead, Darius offers to carry Laleh, who’s falling asleep, and the family walks out of the airport.

Outside the airport, the Kellners are greeted by Jamsheed and an overjoyed Mamou, who races to hug her daughter and grandchildren. Darius sits next to his grandmother on the drive to Yazd; to his embarrassment, she asks him about school and whether he has a girlfriend. He eventually falls asleep with her running her fingers through his hair, reminded of the way his mother used to chant to him in Farsi while putting him to bed. When Darius was even younger, his father told him bedtime stories—a practice he abruptly stopped before Laleh’s birth.

Arriving in Yazd, Darius is surprised by the paved streets and white brick houses: “To be honest, even though I had seen plenty of pictures, I still kind of expected Yazd to look like a scene from Aladdin: dirt streets lined with palm trees, domed palaces made out of sparkling alabaster, laden camels carrying goods to a bazaar” (76). As they take the luggage indoors, there’s an awkward moment when Darius offers to help and Jamsheed insists on doing it himself. Darius has never mastered taarof—an Iranian code of politeness involving ritualized shows of deference and self-denial—and his mother must extricate him from the interaction.

Once inside, Mamou shows Darius to a guest room and offers him breakfast. He declines, opting for a shower and a nap. However, he has difficulty falling asleep, because the box fan he positions to blow on him keeps rattling on its legs.