Red Red

By Maryam Abolfazli

For fans of Margaret Atwood, RED RED is a fast-moving novel that anticipates our future.

Like half of the United States, Athena is on a mission to prevent the country from being ripped apart by its manic president, who is calling for secession an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maryam Abolfazli
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735763514

Maryam Abolfazli

Maryam Abolfazli is an Iranian American storyteller, coach, educator and social impact strategy design consultant. For twenty years, she built her career as an international economic and political development professional, working in Eurasia and the Middle East, to assist in improving the political and economic realities of marginalized communities. During this time, she wrote and documented her travels and observations in publications such as the Huffington Post, Guernica, and The Guardian. She lives in Nashville, TN and often sneaks away at night to tell stories on stage for the MOTH Story Slam in Nashville, and Story District in Washington DC.

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For Auden

Preface

During Thanksgiving of 2016, while visiting my parents in Nashville, TN, I walked into my room at my parents’ home and sat on my dad’s old office chair stored away in the bedroom. There, I wrote the first pages of Red Red. Just weeks before, I’d quit my career and six-figure job in pursuit of writing.

After those first pages were written, I walked out of the bedroom and into the living room with a pregnant feeling. I was full, ignited, and sensed that there was much more to come. 

Weeks before, like many others, I was deflated at the outcome of the presidential elections. Politics has always been about more than government for me and my family. Iranians are obsessed with politics because of what it has wreaked on our lives. So, the meaning of the election was deeply personal. 

And yet, I wasn’t surprised. Over the months before the election, I’d spoken to people in Nashville when I visited my family, and Los Angeles where I lived at the time, who were planning to vote for the man who would become president. This had given me the bitter taste of what the reality was in the country at the time. 

Despite this, I was more hopeful than my friends and former colleagues in Washington DC, a place I had worked and lived for ten years. Mainly because I’m a steadfast and perhaps foolish optimist. I knew that, regardless of what the election results were aiming to curtail, reverse, or end, the wheels of history had already moved too far in the direction of progress. That didn’t mean the ensuing years wouldn’t be painful. 

What is important for me to say here is that it was this hope that gave me the ability to write this book. 

For the next three months, living as a nomad between Los Angeles and Washington DC, I worked on the book. My friend Kim, who housed me in Los Angeles, read each chapter after I finished, and her enthusiasm kept me going. My friend Steve, in San Jose, told me that the book needed to be published as soon as possible or it might dwindle in relevance. This kept the fire burning inside me to finish it and somehow get it out into the world.

The book’s style is fast, staccato, moving you forward maybe faster than you want. It is abrupt. This is intentional, for that is the pace and attention span of today. We have no time to process the historical weight of our decisions. There is a swiftness in its style, likely rooted in my own urgency about documenting the matters that I sensed would come to pass. 

Writing day in and day out, I finished the first draft of Red Red after the 2017 Women’s March, while attending the Muslim ban protests at Los Angeles airport. The essential story hasn’t changed through multiple rewrites and revisions, and the urgency can be felt at the turn of each page. 

Except for a few grant writing gigs, I worked on Red Red exclusively until February of 2017, when I both finished the draft and ran out of money. Not knowing what to do next with the book, I put it down to go attend to life. 

In July 2017, I tried, during a vacation in La Baule, France, to squeeze the very visual story into a film script for a competition. I spent most of the vacation mornings working on it and submitted it that Friday. I didn’t win the competition, but something about doing this helped solidify the plot of the book. 

A month later, I was pregnant with my son, Auden, and that eclipsed all other creative pursuits. However, a dream doesn’t die or get replaced, and I couldn’t forget the book. So, each winter in 2018 and 2019, I did a rewrite/revision phase, keeping much of the original storyline intact and simply adding meat to the bones of the story. 

Over that time, all that I had sensed, all that I knew on some strange level of consciousness, did come to pass, particularly in 2020. It was then that I knew, it was time to publish the book. I finished the final draft in April 2020, in the midst of the quarantine. I wanted to publish it myself, to ensure it happened before the 2020 election.

As I write these words, the day after Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, there is one final thing to say about this. In my time working in Iran, I studied the state of women’s rights there, along with the various societal restrictions that prevent women from participating. Among those are the inability to rent an apartment in a woman’s name or to have laws that protect against gender discrimination in the workplace. Much of what a woman does in Iran, requires a male co-signer or male guardian, of sorts. In the US, we like to advertise about our gender equality, but much of it is thanks to individuals like Justice Ginsburg, and much of it was only achieved in the last fifty years. This book is dedicated to her, and that fire within, and to the truth that one person can achieve so much for the greater good. 

Red Red was written with a profound sense of inevitability. We cannot escape the repercussions of the choices we made yesterday. But this book was also written with a deep hope that we still have, in each one of us, the sacrifice and power to set us all free. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, That’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.

There are storytellers who write to make sense of the past. I am a storyteller that tries to make sense of the future.

PART ONE

Chapter One

California 2054

All this time, Athena had not gone back to that place. For the past thirty-six years, she had avoided Bakersfield and that section of Interstate 5 altogether. But now, Cela was asking her to return. Athena didn’t know if she could. It wasn’t the place itself. It was more about that time in her life she didn’t want to go back to.

Now in her late life, she enjoyed her view from the farm, her coffee, and the silence. Looking back was pointless—the events and the choices were all consequences of another state of mind, another version of herself and the world. But, Cela was forcing her to remember. She closed her eyes. She still could recall the fear—the way the pores in her skin felt like metal whenever she saw him. She still could feel the tightness in her chest, the way his voice caused her heart to beat faster. The way he would mention Cela, and Athena would go white inside, all the blood leaving her organs. She wasn’t proud of that fear or how it dominated her thoughts in those days, but it was the only thing that could explain why she did what she did. She had once thought of herself as so strong and so brave. She didn’t know if she was, but the truth was, she was still glad that she did it.

Chapter Two

Bakersfield 2018

It was still dark that morning when she drove out on Interstate 5. She parked on the road by the field as instructed. She was alone. She wished the sun would just push through. She could hear her feet crushing the frost-bitten grass beneath her. She wanted to go fast; she knew she needed to hurry, but she was afraid to run lest she attract the attention of a nearby motorist. No one could know that she was on that field on that day, that hour, for this.

Then she heard the crying. She was close. Her heart knocked against her chest incessantly. The heat of her body rose despite the cold. She was terrified. She wasn’t equipped for this. She didn’t know how to do this. She didn’t know how to be a mother.

Then—right there. Her foot hit an object in the grass, a black perforated carrying case. She stopped; her chest expanded. A moment, a breath, before all the rest. She leaned over, opened the case, and pulled back the blanket. The baby’s small head was covered with a knitted hat. Her eyes were open. Athena drew another deep breath. She lifted the baby to her face. Her weight was so small; it was something and yet nothing at the same time, terrifyingly fragile. Gently cradling the baby in her arms, Athena softened. She sank to her knees and began to weep. There, in that barren field, she trembled with the baby’s soft face on her neck. She felt the vibrations of the baby’s cry begin to slow at the meeting of their skin.

She slid the hat off of the little girl’s ear and touched it; it felt like a petal. With the tips of her fingers, she cupped the tiny shoulder composed of the most malleable material. Nothing was solid yet.

A lingering teardrop fell from her nose, cold on her skin, reminding her that she needed to get going. She took off her jacket, and although she felt the sharp morning air prick her skin, she placed the jacket around the baby to keep her warm. She pulled the baby back up to her chest. For a moment, her knees and thighs wouldn’t unfold; she’d been squatting down for longer than she realized. As she looked around her, the sun was rising at the edge of the field, and the light shone on the surface of the ground through the blades of yellow grass. There was no one around, which was her main concern. There could be no witnesses.

She put the baby back in the carrier and walked back towards her car. Six minutes. It took her six minutes to walk out of the field, and the whole way she felt her life changing, altered with each step. She was no longer one. She would never again be one. She was immensely attached and desperately alone at the same time.

Chapter Three

California 2016

Tuesday, December 6, the day she knew that things were going to change irreparably. She remembered that because on Tuesdays, they got juice delivered to the office. Juice. Seven dollars to spare on juice. Later, seven dollars would be a whole night’s stay in the camps and then a whole day’s pay for some. She was thirty-five, still a child. The COO of a tech company in California, years before the Colony. An upstanding citizen. She even paid taxes. It was a bubble of simplicity, though back then, technology seemed so complex and revolutionary. Sanitized revolution; nothing like what would come. In time, they would learn that revolution was a particular form of prolonged torture, a daily blended juice of scarcity, ingenuity, shock, and pain.

When it happened, she never once wondered how. How Mason became president. It was simple. While people spun in shock, he gathered supporters. It was easy because his opposition loved intellectual masturbation. They were addicted to the chaos of him. Stuck in some debate about identity politics, meanwhile, the free world was dividing itself up. You over there, us over here. Was it that white people were feeling left behind while Mexicans were putting up drywall? Was it that a $10,000 community college degree was becoming a criterion for landing a lush nine-dollars-an-hour Walmart gig? Was it that everyone was actually racist? Muslims. It definitely had to do with Muslims. Why would the world vote for such an asshole? The analysis was like an endless string wrapped into a ball, growing thicker and thicker, being