Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  For most of his formative years, like those of his gender, Xerxes generally found himself in the company of men, or rather, boys. Boys with names like Chris, Ryan, Brian, and Joey, although even Ezra and Yukio would appear. In California, a “Y” name they could do but an “X” name—no, that was subversive, somehow off, subject to all sorts of avoidance, fun-making, and ill-founded investigation.

  The hardest friend to make was, for obvious reasons, a boy named Adam, who, in spite of it became Xerxes’s best friend through much of his single-digit years. As if to further taunt Xerxes for his name with its odd “Adam” surname and socially unacceptable “X”-y first name, teachers routinely took to accidentally calling Xerxes “Adam” when they meant “Xerxes.” This was of course embarrassing on both ends, and soon what began as a minor annoyance turned into a major one and eventually something adding up roughly to a Problem.

  The real Adam had many odds against him, odds which only multiplied in those awkward years—he was fat, prematurely pimpled, perpetually smelling of an already overripe boy-musk, cursed with a constant supply of unfashionable hand-me-downs, and of course incredibly untalented at sports—the sum of which spelled total doom in elementary school terms. And befriending Xerxes made nothing better. Soon, kids—catching on that Xerxes’s insistence on his last name’s proper pronunciation was wearing off a bit, that it was breaking down from the defiant revolutionary “Odd-damn” to the watered-down, half-ass “Odd-dumb,” which had to mean very soon it would land as its normal, rightful “Aaa-dumb”—decided it would be funny to spread the disease to Xerxes’s tiny empire of two, by disgracing his dumpy sad sidekick with the apparently correct pronunciation of his better half, “Odd-damn.” Soon, agonized Adam grew all the more angst-ridden as the handball mafia and the jungle gym elite derided him with “Hey, Odd! Odd-damn!” Sometimes a clever wormy girl or two would hiss at him,“Damn, you’re odd.” Somehow it was Xerxes who came out unscathed through these interactions. It was a truly odd thing to have the object of another man’s insult be you, odder to have that insult in no way touch you. Xerxes was amazed at the linguistic ingenuity of his peers. Kids had a way with saying fuck you to everyone, no one, and still one or two, all at the same time.

  One day Adam decided to bring it up to Xerxes. Inspired by boredom to become unusually expressive as he and Xerxes spent their longest recess in unambitious rockings and lazy circles, idly, on the swings, he cleared his throat and let it all out, “Hey, why don’t you just say our name right, jerk?”

  Xerxes rolled his eyes. Already by fourth grade he was phenomenally bored by the subject. “Your name is not my name, fool.”

  “You’re wrong! It is! Wake up! You’re like everyone else! What, you wanna feel special or something, dork?”

  As a matter of fact, Xerxes at that point subscribed to the deep conviction that he was special. For starters, he was quite different and he had the suspicion that it was the better sort of different. He was well aware of extreme potential if not a guaranteed exceptional future. Never mind that his parents and teachers fed him that bullshit constantly, but he just felt better. Somehow it didn’t irk him to be stuck with fat loser Adam for a sidekick or to be constantly greeted by girls’ stuck-out tongues, or to be endlessly picked on by teachers who could maybe tell, too, and resented this better man disrupting the lowbrow harmony of the communistic classroom society. In spite of looking at who his parents were—their foul-smelling past, his hodgepodge nightmare heritage, his unclear place in this or any world—Xerxes back then did like himself. He believed himself to be an honest clearheaded young man who had perspective, a good grasp on objective reality, and deep trust in the truth. And so all he could say to Adam at that point was the objective truth:

  “Sucks to be you, asshole.”

  Adam said nothing. But months later, Adam’s retort came in a particularly graphic form.

  It was on the day before their holiday break, during the routine card-swapping/gift-giving nonsense that teachers filled the final day of a semester with. … Xerxes was going around numbly dishing out Lala’s hastily-bought supply of plastic-wrapped cracked candy canes, when Adam suddenly approached him with a card and particular sort of smug smile. Naturally, once he was seated, Adam’s was the first card he opened.

  At first glance, it was simply confusing. It was not what he expected, clearly not the kind of card that came from supermarket or mother’s hand. Adam had made the card especially for him, it seemed. It was something quite different; it was, in fact, barely a card.

  It was nothing but a simple index card with a wobbly animal drawn in underneath a scrawled “MERRY X-MAS. Adam.” He looked closely at the penciled creature. It was a horse, he thought. But not quite. A cow? Not cowish enough. Bull? Deer? A unicorn? Possibilities. But when he looked closer he saw that those were no horns. …

  They were humps.

  He swallowed a few times. No, he knew … there was no getting around it … it was that dreaded that. Adam had drawn him a camel.

  What haunted the future adult Xerxes the most about this was how clearly he understood, as just a young kid, what the camel symbolized. It had left him in a daze for the rest of that day. He avoided Adam like the plague, hid in the bathroom for recesses, and at 3:15 when the final bell shrieked, he sprinted into his father’s car, instead of taking his usual sheepish after-school stroll.

  “What happened to you?” Darius Adam asked, alarmed at the sudden display of energy.

  “Nothing,” Xerxes answered breathlessly, slamming the door shut with all his little might. He had decided against showing his father the card. He was sure it would make everything worse, somehow, in some way, as everything that involved his father suddenly took that turn. He had decided, anyway, that it would be best to forget the whole thing.

  “C’mon, son. I’ll keep asking and it will keep annoying you so let’s get it over with, what do you say?” Darius insisted.

  The resolve of children, especially if they are too young to realize “adult” is not so different from them, is often flimsy. Xerxes, with a groan, with a mental middle finger—given to everyone, Adam, himself, his father, his family, Iran, camels, everyone—took the crumpled “card” out of his pocket and handed it over to his father.

  He knew it, too, immediately. “What? Shotore! It’s a shotore. A camel. Is it a camel? It is, right?” He was smiling, as if it was a recognition game and he’d get a cookie for seeing a thing for what it bloody was.

  Xerxes glared at his dad. “You know what it means.”

  His father ignored him, put the card in his breast pocket, and whistled all the way home. Just like that. When they got to the garage, he turned off the car and turned to Xerxes.

  “Camels have nothing to do with us,” he began. “Do you understand? Just you making a link with us and camels is the problem, you see? This kid, he drew a beast on your card. That is all it is to you. Got it?”

  Xerxes suddenly felt his face grow boiling hot, and the humiliation of his father’s eyes beholding the raw redness only made it worse. He got that taste in his mouth and felt the dull sting in his eyes. He was about to. Oh, he was close. He hated that. Sometimes, especially at that age, Xerxes would get dangerously close to full-on bawling, but would by some masculine miracle be reined back and rescued at the final moment.

  He nodded. He wanted the conversation over with and so he nodded many times and the conversation vanished obediently.

  And he never spoke to Adam again.

  By junior high, Adam thinned down, acquired flawless skin under a successful oral-plus-topical-antibiotic regime, suddenly took on tennis which he was remarkably talented at, played lead sax in the school band, made the top five lists of the female oligarchy of their grade, and thus, against the old odds, became the most popular boy in his grade. He wasn’t a one-off—Xerxes had a highly impressive track record for attracting the most unappealing sorts who would eventually, after an awkward incubation with him, inherit that intangible cooldom as an ou
t from their temporary friendship and an entry to their successful new beginnings. His friendship was like a halfway house for loserdom’s last dance. Xerxes was … proud, he liked to joke. To himself.

  “Are you what they call popular?” his father would ask. “I mean, you have friends?”

  “I am popular; I have friends,” said junior-high Xerxes in his favorite new persona, the auto-programmed robot that played questions back in statement form, that only affirmatived or negatived, that came out of life unscathed because he’d chosen to exist outside of life. Yes. This persona was one of the few that he found very useful later in his adult life.

  “I thought so,” Darius always answered.

  Of course, secretly Darius was suspicious of his son’s social adjustment. And he never forgot the camel card either. He kept the card in his files forever. Once in a while he would accidentally find it when looking for something else and it would make him pause and suddenly forget whatever else he was looking for and think back to little Xerxes, age nine, pretending he was not about to cry, getting this sick bullshit from a kid his age, a disgusting American slob-freak—how did any of these boys understand what that meant? How did kids know so much?

  What haunted him the most was his admittedly bad handling of the situation; on occasion Darius got so honest in his self-evaluations that the analyses punctured that generally unused pseudo organ of his, the alternating hardening-and-softening pulsating blob of conscience. Many decades later, after that landmark first and only trip to New York City to visit his son, Darius, bored on the plane ride home, found an empty pack of Camel cigarettes in the seat pouch in front of him. With Xerxes always somewhat lurking in his subconscious, he was suddenly reminded of the camel card and Xerxes’s reaction and his treatment, and he thought it was possible that his son’s grievances with him began back in the time of Adam and the camel card. Forget birds, when you had the camel and the intimidating menagerie of ugly anti– Middle Eastern sentiment that it opened a door to, in a new land where you were the most freshly foreign and thus victim to such hate, with the uprooting from oldness to newness where hate like a reflex likes to precede understanding, all from an Islamic Revolution that made escape more necessary than ever fully possible, after decades and centuries of corruption and exploitation and manipulation by the West’s shining gold and East’s dusty gods that put the capital R in “Revolution,” and all of their ill-founded dynasties and incest-maddened emperors and the backward invasions and the shaky kingdoms built by homicide and suicide and even infanticide that directed the baddest karma like well-trained bloodhounds, all the unsound blood in the sand and restless spirits behind the sun from Before Christ, destined by history’s tireless cyclical soul to derail all the ad to come. … Yes, no, see, see! the older Darius wanted to explain to the older Xerxes. It was nothing personal, son! Birds, camels, please! It was always about other things, no? Things bigger than us! We, we would have been okay! It was everything else that wouldn’t let us! Trace the trouble, look deeper—and it’s all there! How could we, small us, really stand a chance against civilization, history, and blood, son?

  “I never knew about that,” Lala said, as Darius just barely explained why he’d been compelled to bring home an empty pack of Camels as a souvenir of parental failure. “Why didn’t you tell me about the camel card?”

  “I could not speak about it. I meant well. I didn’t want it to be a big deal in Xerxes’s eyes.”

  “Who was this Adam?”

  “Nobody,” Darius said—but what was he saying?! He gruffly addressed the truth, “I think he was that valedictorian kid on the football team who went to Princeton, maybe. …”

  “Oh. I thought you said a fat little kid—he was not fat at all, tall and thin actually. …”

  “So goes life.”

  “I don’t think that’s what caused whatever it caused on your trip,” Lala insisted. “I am sure Xerxes doesn’t even remember that card.”

  “Every time I see him about to cry, he’s thinking back to that first time I saw him like that, with the camel card. I know my son.”

  “He never cries,” she said, not being able to recall an instance outside of his infanthood.

  “Shows what you know, woman. He is a soft guy. He is constantly about to.” The truth was Darius Adam was not sure. He knew him then less than he had ever known the guy, but he assumed he was filled with some pain, possibly enough pain to force him into that—softness, susceptibility—because that was the business of pain, to conquer, not kill.

  “Well,” Lala snapped, frustrated, “maybe you should do something about all this! I don’t know! Turn back time! I don’t have these problems with any of you … leave me out!”

  So he did, and so did he. For a while, both men left Lala out of their cold war. And both of them, in inevitable father-and-son sync, wondered if this was just how it had to be, over and over, offspring after offspring of good and sometimes great men, stuck in sticky cycles of silent wars and emotional massacres over their ever-finite, eventually invisible, inherited kingdoms. …

  The Iranians, thought Xerxes.

  The Iranian men, thought Xerxes.

  Shit, thought Xerxes. Unlike their long-gone namesakes living on in reliefs and ruins, on some level they were just words with problems inherent in their own etymologies, still burning through whatever tongue, however foreign, however safe ….

  Part Three

  Heavens

  In the only residential district built entirely upon a hilltop in the southern end of Pasadena, California—a city known, in a sense, for its Rose Parade, Rose Bowl, Rose pageant, and little old ladies; a town tagged heavily with descriptors like “fragrant, “suburban,” “oblivious,” “heavenly,” “oasis-y”—there is one main windy road, Linda Vista, that entangles itself like an out-of-service noose, creating curvy little substreets with the names Mockingbird, Elysian, Glenwood, Sherry, and Arcadia. At the highest point on Arcadia Drive sits one of the smallest of the larger apartment complexes of its sort. This is Eden Gardens: thirty-some units of pastel pink stucco, wildly shrouded by an imposing green. Thanks to the poor Mexican gardeners, more than two of them unfortunately going by the name “Jose”—perpetuating the casually Californian, ignorant assumption that all Mexican migrant day laborers are named Jose—thanks to them, Eden Gardens, to the pride of landlord Pelican and his residents, is at the very least superficially extraordinary. It is not uncommon to have visitors refer to it, upon entry through the glass French doors—always open and apparently irreparably broken—as “unlike any other” and “out of this world.” Eden Gardens, for instance, may not be alone in featuring a pool, but what pool could boast the extra fauna, natural water lizards, water bugs, the occasional skimming bird, and an occasional common dead furry or feathered thing bobbing in the anemic tide? The animal presence is strong, from field mice to garden snakes to the strange California pets, all in abundance. Constantly—4 a.m., half-past midnight, perhaps every hour—to wake one up, to coo one to sleep, birds erratically release aggressive, exclamation-point-heavy sirens through their rather vast slice of the cosmic fabric. And not just any birds, but often the neighborhood’s native parrots—the offspring of the avian underlings of a mad old millionaire, they say, who lived in the neighborhood a half century ago when the entire hilltop, on the upswing, flourished as one luxurious minor-celebrity-ridden hotel. Legend had it that it was he who had decided one day to set his dozens of pet parrots off back into the sorta wild, and thus parrots survived enough to create the new batch of ever-shrieking first-generation outcast aerial animalia for the neighborhood. As native as anyone, green and gold and ungodly, they have become the least celebrated symbols of a township just fifteen minutes from an ever-bustling, amicably toxic, pink-and-brown-sky-lit downtown LA.

  Lala Adam always took note of her great LA outdoors … only because she was one of the few nobodies who walked in LA. Not just because she could not drive, but because she had downtime. Over and over, she became house-rid
den, flunking several different jobs in the New Country. She didn’t mind. She let them give her the boot without much upset, unemployment checks tucking her back in nicely at home, a place where she apparently belonged yet was constantly fantasizing about leaving. To battle this conflicted confinement, she took walks. She never got far. Usually just the pathways surrounding their complex and maybe the winding stretch of Arcadia Drive was enough. She walked, watched the birds, counted their omnipresent poopings, tsk ed, dodged bees, idly picked the state poppies, and gazed out into the heavy death-tinged Los Angeles skyline. She was happy there.