Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  And she would not. That would be Shireen’s greatest gift to him, always. She did not see his ugliness. When it was blatantly there she insisted he was playing a role, just joking, making a point. For Shireen, like a cloud the thing would exist, then quickly disperse, then poof! disappear. He would be absolved. Would you believe? She would shake her head, laughing. What a kooky father she had. He would hug her. Absolved.

  For his son this was not the case. “Would you believe,” Darius muttered quietly, capping the tale with a cough, and Xerxes nodded. He was in fact nodding the whole time, as if it was a story he didn’t know and yet sensed all his life. Darius could think of no other word for his son’s expression than glazed. He looked deadish, in a neat, preserved, polished sort of way. He had seen his son look that way once before.

  Several minutes later, Xerxes cleared his throat and said with an unprecedented carefulness—he was suddenly more sober than he had ever been in his entire life, he felt—slowly and quietly, with an additional softness that wasn’t his, or any Adam’s at all: “I wasn’t asking about those birds. I didn’t know about that. The blue jays and cats, that was my question.”

  His father felt a deep runaway train rush right through him, like an elevator of sense dropping deep down through his guts and landing with a thud into his pelvis—Xerxes had gotten him where it hurt most, in the zone of pure lunatic error. “Oh.” It was a sensation he rarely let himself feel; it was the sensation of a man doing what manhood requires he avoid: admitting he was wrong. “Oh, I …” He had made a rather substantial wrong. Of all the fuckups in his life, this one was bad, but. There was thankfully a but: it was perhaps the most necessary, for it was a fuckup that felt like a fuckup but had the slightly positive side effect of taking that proverbial load off his shoulders.

  Darius tried to sigh but it came out like a moan.

  “Oh, well, they are still causing problems,” Darius rasped. “The cats. The birds. I mean. You know. The animals. The old trouble, still.”

  His son didn’t seem to hear him.

  His shoulders did feel relieved of some load, but it was as if he had traded that for a different type of burden—instead fangs, nails, prods, beaks poking into his back. He felt injured suddenly. Something reeked of his doom.

  In trying to stay calm, in trying to think up instead of down, in aiming for fix-it mode, Darius Adam went ahead with what often happened when he had such intentions: the opposite. He exploded.

  “What can I say?! You came out of it, from me, from my life, how can it all be so bad? How come it’s all so bad with us? I’m not afraid to say it’s you, Xerxes! You can’t face that you were built of my past—hell, even the past before me—can you? You’ve decided to be of no past! Ha! Think you can come here and pretend there was nothing and I was nothing and everything of Xerxes-before-he-came-to-New-York is nothing? You think you can cut it all off, eh?! But it doesn’t work, I am telling you! So for once in your life, your goddamn so-far-so-short life, face and accept it, all of it, then get over it, all of it, and, enough, let us move on!!”

  But Xerxes couldn’t move, much less move on. For the first time in his life, Xerxes felt nothing for his father, absolutely nothing. His own devastation shocked him. Was it the birds? No. He didn’t care about the birds—at least, not like that. Perhaps it was his father’s cruel and unusual past, a world forbidden to be spoken of, that Xerxes had always sensed intrinsically? Another reason, any reason, a final reason, to hate himself and his family? All he knew for sure was that the feeling had familiarity. This was one in a long line of his father’s stories that he had unloaded on him, burdened him with, but, as often happens with what is saved deliberately for last, this one would have to be the worst. The past had come full circle; this story had pulled with it every other story; history had become theirs, just theirs.

  “Son, are you hearing me? Your father is speaking to you—hello?”

  It was too much. Xerxes felt his body grow cold and he shuddered, shuddered from the soles of his cold feet to his numbed skull, shuddered long and hard as if a ghost had taken residence in his body, and he looked around and sought something in the sudden quiet of his adopted city’s streets, as if aware that something bad, something worse, was going to happen to them all. He suddenly felt like he could sense millions of panicked pulses around him, like the instability had become bigger than just theirs. The old phobia overtook him until he was sure the world around him wanted to explode and he blamed himself. He had let his father come to him, he had brought his city to his father; he had done the one thing that as a child he had learned never to do: he had let the worlds mix.

  “Let’s go back,” Xerxes heard himself mutter, slowly scanning the infinite blocks of city, until his eyes had nowhere to go but to fall on his father.

  They finally faced each other, silently, for what felt like the passing of many generations. It was as if their entire lives they had waited for the power of a single story to split them forever.

  The world reveals its intentions in sick ways, ways livid with meaning, and Xerxes knew only time would tell why that story had to be the one. He turned around and began leading the way back to his apartment. Tomorrow evening, his father would be gone. They went to bed immediately that night. The next day Xerxes left a note saying he had errands to run all day, a note his father would get late, as he had been out running errands all day himself. When they finally met up again in the evening, a few hours before his father’s flight, they stared at each other over an empty suitcase. “How heavy can a carry-on be again?” was the sole question he was able to ask of his son. Xerxes shrugged and muttered, “Heavier than you think.” That was that, and he quickly decided it was time to get the paper downstairs. His father’s flight was in two hours. He went out, got the paper, and patronized the corner bar for another four hours, until he was absolutely sure that his father would be gone, until he was completely certain he’d be sufficiently wasted beyond caring.

  In their minds, they remained in true sync on one notion: they had both decided they would do their best to make that moment, the one about the heaviness of carry-ons, the last time the two men would speak ever again.

  Part Two

  Kingdoms

  They were named after kings.

  Try explaining that when they give him their confused looks, after just barely managing it with roll call, usually settling on what they assume was wrong anyway, a clunky absurd “Exer-excess.” Sometimes they might risk the Z-sounding X’s—“Zerzezz” being the most common mispronunciation, but rarely do they make it just a few nudges over to its rightful “Zerk-sees.”

  (Nobody was bothering to explain, of course, that the family had already made concessions, inside the home and out, by settling on the Hellenized versions of the old Persian names—try the actual Khashayar if you wanted a headache with pronunciation.)

  It’s the last name that they rush to get out, hoping it might rescue them from the insult-and-injury cycle, with its familiar American form—the simple, biblical even, “Adam”—not realizing it’s there where the most damage gets done. In spite of Xerxes’s secret and sometimes not-so-secret acquiescence to the Americanized “Aaa-dumb,” Darius Adam—whose first name fared well once he let go of too much Dareeyoosh-ing, blessed/cursed by American black men’s fortuitous lease on a simple “Dairy-us”—would never once take what they could give on his last name.

  “Odd-damn, please,” he would correct every time.

  “A-D-A-M-S, right, sir?”

  “A-D-A-M. Zero ‘S,’” he would grumble.

  “A-D-A-M?”

  “Yes, A-D-A-M. Odd-damn! Odd-damn!” he would shout, like an overzealous standard-bearer, brandishing his coat of arms.

  “Okay, okay, sir! I just assumed A-D-A-M would be Aaa-dumb. …”

  “No, trust me. It’s my goddamn name. It’s my goddamn Farsi name. Persian. Iranian—or Eyeranian, now you understand? Take my goddamn Odd-damn word for it.” Now he was fuming—nothing bothered Darius Adam
more than when jokes, puns, rhymes, et cetera happened without his permission.

  “Ha, yes! Apologies, Mr. … Aa-damn?”

  Just fuming. “To hell with you.”

  He didn’t know how to make it clearer, that it had nothing to do with their Adam. He remembered a particular ordeal during young Xerxes’s first season in kindergarten, back when he was cute and everyone was friends with everyone, even the foreign, particularly if they were cute. Xerxes had had a friend with his own strange name, Ezra—apparently plucked from the biblical baby name books by the suburban Baptists to whom the gold-cross-and-“Total Devotion!”-T-shirt-wearing five-year-old was born—and one day, when Darius was driving them home from school, came the precocious question that would define his very Ezra-ness forever in Darius’s mind,

  “Did you know, my parents wondered if you were Christians or Islams?”

  Darius Adam was furious. The kid was five. What did he know about Islams? “Why do your parents want to know?”

  “I dunno,” he grinned and added rather brilliantly, Darius had to admit, for it did absolve him in a sense, “I’m five.”

  “Yes, well, you can have them ask me.”

  “Okay. Did you know, what’s your last name?”

  “Odd-damn.”

  He was five and brilliant and an asshole, Darius decided when Ezra then turned immediately to his son, with a giggle, and said, “Xerxes, what’s your last name?”

  His son immediately—this was the age before parent fearing, after all—answered him with a clear, bold, “Aaa-dumb.”

  Ezra giggled on. “Did you know, that’s the first man!”

  “No!” said Darius, immediately depressed that it had come down to just a “no,” a desperate general negation, as in: I negate you, little Ezra-asshole, and everything you are, your world, your parents, your beliefs, your America, no no no! What else could he say? This was no time to chastise Xerxes. He wondered how deep he could get into it with this all-knowing baby Jesus-lover. “No,” Darius muttered again and paused until he figured out the only calm, cool, but suitably astringent reply, “but I was wondering why, did you know, do you have a girl’s name, Ez-ra?” He knew he was likely wrong but as it went in their New World, sometimes wrong hurt righter than right.

  That evening he had a long talk with Xerxes, who had, as kids do, immediately forgotten the whole thing and moved on with his life. “Odd-damn, Xerxes. It is not an American name. You must remember that. You are Persian. If not Persian, then Iranian. Two choices.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Actually, you can call me Pedar or Baba if you want.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  “And when people ask you about Adam, of Adam and Eve, you say ‘no relation,’ got it?”

  “Who are they, Daddy?”

  Ignorance was bliss—no need to make the forbidden fruit sweeter for his newly irritating young son. “Oh, just Ezra’s parents.”

  Routinely, over the next few years as their relationship grew more and more wordless, the silences becoming more their trademark dynamic than incongruous episodes, Xerxes, still too young to recognize the genius behind his annoying inquiries, would find occasional moments to pierce the dead air with his favorite questions: “Who is God’s wife?” “Does everyone’s caca look the same?” “How do ants make babies?” and sometimes, “What does our last name mean again?” Darius assumed he knew but was trying to trap him, hoping for the day he’d just give up and collapse into “Aaa-dumbs” and admit they were just stupid Americans, too.

  “It means human.”

  “My name is Xerxes Human?” he would say, often spiking the question with giggles.

  “No, Xerxes Odd-damn,” Darius would snap. “You don’t have to translate every goddamn thing on earth to the English, you know.”

  Usually Xerxes would stop there but when he got older and smarter, an older and smarter inquiry got tagged on: “Dad, does it interest you at all that Adam was the first man in Western civilization, and our last name Odd-damn also means ‘man’ or ‘human’? What’s your take?”

  “Oh, Xerxes,” he would sigh, long and hard, stalling in the universal annoyed-dad manner, while his mind raced for negations of an appropriately intellectual magnitude. He was smart, his son, but naïve, certainly. “You’re still young apparently. One day you will grow up to see the world for what it is: disconnected and chaotic. Not everything is linked. You are what you are; they are what they are. Grow up already.”

  And so he did. And still, in Xerxes’s head, there were theories.

  For Darius, the Adam/Odd-damn fight never ceased to upset. It was he, after all, who had chosen the cursed spelling at the INS office upon their arrival to the country. An agent had eyed the snaky Farsi script on their travel documents—their nonsense curlicues that were supposedly script and scribbled from right to left, the backward people!—and demanded they, right there on the spot, come up with a spelling for their Green Cards. He had debated phonetics with the bored agent who offered them “Autumn,” “Oddman,” and “Adam.” In the end, a neighboring Iranian in line had made himself known and said “Adam” was a winner, as it meant the same thing, human really, and Darius—immediately equating etymological shoulder-rubbing as infernal conspiracy theory, perhaps another way in which the West had robbed his East, taken his Adam as their Adam—had decided, why, actually, yes, sir, he would take it back. Only to be later more infuriated by the nonsense “S” tagged on to many American “Adams” families (insult-injury cycle further aggravated by the fact that Adams meant “chewing gum” in Farsi). Still, at the INS office he forced a smile at this new variation of his coat of arms and he adopted and embraced his Adam without ever considering the everyday phonetic battles that would make up a large part of his daily life in the New World.

  But even so, to Darius, “Adam” was not the real problem. The first name was the source of their real problems, his and his son’s, something the outside world could never fathom. On the upside, it was a small chip at the inherent claustrophobia of the closetsized dismal father-son universe—they shared the name trouble. They had both been tagged, perhaps even cursed, at birth, each by his own father—who knows out of what spite or vainglory they did it, Darius would wonder, passing on the musing to Xerxes, who later, upon his severalth nervous breakdown, would also wonder about the possibility of socio-psycho-semiological-metaphysical curses, the fateful power of fucked monikers, the lifeless and nonexistent and mytho-historic-inanimania once again one-upping the living—something like that anyway, as during those periods when their names would come rushing out at him, this was how Xerxes would think, feverish from bouts of familial chaos theory and hived with ancestral existential smallpox. … The underlying problem, both men thought, was that from the moment of birth, his Xerxes to his Darius and his Darius to his Xerxes, was to create one hell of a highly flammable foundation for the mayhem dance of their joint kingdom of Adam.

  Darius, King of Persia, Part I

  Let me explain, he would begin, our history is a his-story, blood on blood, a hot one, and if you take the line and read that which is underneath the lines—It’s ‘read between the lines,’ Dad, ‘read between the lines,’ you mean, his son would hopelessly correct, and he would insistently ignore, preferring his errors to their right—then you, you, son, even you, will see your own story.

  Somewhere around twenty-five hundred years before my birth, born out of the royal family Achaemenidae, was one Darius, king of Persia. He died in the year 485 BC. Correction: he was assassinated. He was sixty-four. Not much time for me until my killer comes, if we are to believe the connections, and why not, in a world where it’s more likely that crazy things happen than that things coincide perfectly?

  I thought you thought things are never connected, that looking for connections is, Xerxes pointed out, retarded.

  I say judge for yourself, his father continued. Darius ruled over Persia from 521 till his death. He was the greatest of men—how do we know? Largely from him,
judging from his own inscriptions, especially the reliefs of Behistun in which he chronicled his life, having no choice but to face that okay, fine, yes, I, Darius, am the greatest. Cannot beat this bush around, son.

  Cough, mustered Xerxes. Cough-cough-cough. Cough.

  Listen, before him it was hell. It all began with suicide in a time of governmental corruption—the mad Persian king Cambyses, the second—and then his throne taken by the usurper Smerdis … but these men were not chosen ones. Darius observed all that hell and soon, with what he said was the help of Ahura Mazda—

  Who the hell?

  God, son, god. The Zoroastrian God.

  Mazda? Like the car?

  That is a stupid connection, simple coincidence.

  But I thought you said that connections—

  Enough, son—anyway, with his God’s help, he secured his kingdom. Now there are legends, mostly by the bastard Herodotus, the Greek heathen historian who says that Darius, a man who was not most obviously up for the throne, left the decision of who should be the king of Persia to his ally’s goddamn horses and they—the horses—decided.

  Funny stuff.

  It was clearly a stupid, possibly mistranslated, legend that I include here only to highlight that history is full of bullshit. Anyway, Darius didn’t necessarily own the throne, because his father Hystaspes was still alive. But his father didn’t vie for it; evidently he was courageless. A weak guy, but not a bad one. Hey, I get it: it’s every father’s dream, I would dare say, to be weak in the shadow of his son. It’s a defeat, sure, but it’s also a family triumph. Like how I let you win sometimes. I could just refuse to get off the couch, and say, I am old, I am tired, I am weak, here son, you are me, better than me, mine, my creation, therefore more me than me, but yet under me—here, you have a go. I find this part moving.