Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  “Dang, genie!” Xerxes would exclaim, shaking his head with a flummoxed grin, sometimes even jumping out of his seat with the entranced gusto of grown men deep in the realm of a televised sporting event. “Dang!”

  It was the first time Darius and Lala Adam realized that just because you create a thing, doesn’t mean you will understand or even recognize it. The question why was not even a fair question. It just was. And they could do nothing about it. They talk about a can of worms opening, Darius thought; this is the first time I found my son’s worms outside the can. Lala actually agreed. It made them uneasy, forced them to analyze it, to try to put it in a larger context, to somehow try to come to terms with their son’s first unlikely obsession. It’s just that it’s not normal, Lala thought, that’s all. Isn’t that all? The mystery made them uneasy and then, further, made them question their mysterious uneasiness.

  The speculation of the creators went on for years, and never really ended.

  DARIUS: I never approved of this, so in a way I am not evil to say, hey, her fault entirely! I believe in supervising kids. I believe if your son likes Planet of the Apes, which he did for a while, or Star Trek, which he also did, okay, so they are weird impossible shows, but harmless—TV is what they do when they’re not doing other useless stuff. But if your boy likes a show that is for girls, that’s where I draw the line. But this is the tough part with that damn show: so the main character is a girl—is it a show for girls? Because sometimes guys like girl shows, for the girl. I can live with that: he loved it in the guy-way. Any of us could be guilty of that. Fine.

  LALA: At first I said, oh, he thinks she is from our country. Genies. Better than terrorists!

  DARIUS: She is Arab—get that straight. There are no Persian genies. None! Arabian Nights, got it? No belly dancers either. This Jeannie is just an Arab woman, with a low self-esteem who dyes her hair blonde, with a white man husband she calls “master.” Ha! That sort of disposition is unheard of among the hard—I’ll say it: bitchy—females of Iran.

  LALA: Very early on he asked me what her real name was. “Barbara Eden,” I said. Look, Mother, Barbara Eden is on! he would say. Maybe he thought she owned Eden Gardens?

  DARIUS: I’ll admit it: around that time I bought him his first toy gun.

  LALA: But what is the problem anyway? Oh, your shows about robot armies and things that blow up and crazy killing sounds, that is normal! Oh, sorry, cartoon is normal! What the hell is cartoon? You know, sometimes I have liked it. Nice colors, fun music, everything works out. [Pauses.] It bothers me, yes. I mean, will my son ever wear a tie? Have a car and house and kids and a wife? Or …? Or.

  DARIUS [with fingers in ears, eyes closed]: If you want to know the truth, I trace Xerxes and my problems actually to this, the moment I realized my son was really off. It’s not impossible to say this is the real reason that Xerxes and I were destined to stop talking altogether one day. Barbara Bitchy Eden, you don’t even know us, and look!

  LALA: It was in our early fights that I think Xerxes first saw that married life was all war. With us being us, of course he took a genie! Even I liked her more than us.

  DARIUS: Anyone would wonder it. Is my son? Can he be? Will he be? Well, of course not, I say today. But sometimes when it comes up the old fears arise.

  LALA: He is human first—adam, yes—then boy. He can be whatever he wants to be, like whatever he likes. You know. But that, of course, well, that’s difficult.

  DARIUS: In three letters that start with a G, and no it’s not God, the opposite of God, God’s greatest nightmare, another curse that comes with the territory, only in America!

  LALA: We never talked about it with him. Why give him ideas? In Iran, they don’t exist.

  DARIUS: Sure, in Iran they are there, but they hide. They are considered molesters, boy-child-loving perverts. Once, in America—oh, the black-and-white one of my youth, with its musical couples and family values that made all of us want to come here even before we had to—it was hidden, too. Now everything here, it just all hangs out.

  LALA: You want foreign? Call us foreign with this. We are happy to be, in this matter!

  DARIUS: In America, I am told it once meant “happy.” There you go. America’s heaven: our hell. Their Edens: our jahanam. Happy! If by happy you mean, pedar sageh antareh goh!

  [Pause]

  XERXES: You don’t want to translate that.

  LALA: Eventually he grew up; it went away. By that I mean: we stopped talking about it.

  DARIUS: In the end, there was Enough, and enough was enough—and okay, what if enough wasn’t enough, well, thank God, I have only about three more decades of life—I did what I could, let him, that strange stranger my son, learn in spite of me—and what I can’t see won’t hurt me—if he isn’t, okay, if he is, if that is his happiness, damn us all—

  LALA: Maybe. Sure. But certainly no. At the worst … what are we talking about again?

  XERXES: It was a very difficult childhood. It was the best time of my life.

  Of course, Xerxes attempted to explain his fixation at several points in his childhood without ever getting the chance to get into it uninterrupted—they with their alleged Persian nationalism not even bothering to ask the right questions, not even bothering to probe whether the interest could be, in part, a young boy’s investigation into an American rendering of a Middle Eastern myth, the genie—surely there was something to that? It wasn’t the whole story, but Xerxes wished, at best, that they could see it that way, if they saw it in any way at all, the dullards!—because Jeannie’s dog after all was named “Djinn-Djinn” (Farsi for “demon-demon”), and the enigmatic Chief of All Genies was called “Haji” (Farsi for something roughly like “Dude”), and ancient Persia was even re-created—poorly—in Episode 2 … What do you make of that, any comment on that, O Iranian progenitors?

  Do you ever see what I see?

  What Xerxes did not attempt to point out was that his love of her also involved what she was not. For instance, dark, doom-loving, heavy with the weight of history, harrowing to a western community, a regular on the nightly news circuit, a part of the map they’d teach them to color black, if not blood, if they could—no, these things she was not at all. The happy blonde genie was instead an escape, an impossibility, an out from the realm of heartache and sighs and moans and bawls and screams and breast-beatings and hair-tearings. She was the laugh track laugh that translated roughly to real laughter; she was a network’s whim—some tired, white, underpaid male team’s cheap mindless fantasy, working her way into America’s family time effortlessly. Oh, Xerxes would have taken her “life” story, the episode outlines, his own explorations on theme and character and historical significance, et cetera, and filled the textbooks with her stuff instead of the yellow-and-black 1970s photographs of dusty tanks and soldiers, and emaciated palm trees against flashy murals of turbaned prophets and machine guns, and mustached men whose dirt-powdered faces looked lined with ancient secrets as they guarded their women who, like black-draped ghosts, had the appearance of mourners on eternal parade, the negative space of their dead olive faces speckling the blackened city streets like holes that have long riddled a conscience. If he had it his way, the textbooks would be animated in pink and purple and gold and glitter and bliss and other imponderable arabesques, essences he didn’t imagine belonged to his people. Because above all things that Jeannie was not, she was of a brightness that did not burn.

  Lala began agreeing with Gigi: Yes, you are my sister, sister. Why not? Gigi was not only her first American friend, she may have been her first friend ever. Sure, women had come and gone back in her old life in Iran, but they were mainly school chums, friends of the family, distant cousins, ladies who spoke in formalities and house-warming presents and were known only by their husbands’ last names. Gigi knew her. They had secrets, inside jokes. Once she even went as far as bringing Lala a gift—“panties I thought you probably wear,” she shrugged as she handed over the brown paper bag full of silky, l
acy, flowery thongs, apparently the fruits of a day of bargain shopping in downtown LA discount stores. Lala thanked her, and threw the bag into the garbage once she left, of course—that was too much. But still she recognized it as one in a long line of her many gestures of sisterhood. Gigi was her friend.

  And so the time had come for a good story to back this life, mainly an excuse for Darius, who was bound to smell a rat soon, especially as Gigi was starting to put on the pressure to “hang out” more in the evenings. She tried to explain to Gigi that it would be tough—that Darius wouldn’t understand, that she was a wife and mother, that in her country family women didn’t go out traipsing around in the night.

  Gigi, of course, didn’t like that. “Do you think maybe he is, I don’t know, abusing you?”

  “Abuse?” Lala let the word roll around in her head, evaluating its every angle and crevice through the English language converter machine. No, she thought, she was not getting beaten or forced into sex. No. “No, Gigi.”

  “Oh, I see, being too afraid to go out with your best friend when he’s home, oh, that isn’t abusive?” she snapped, rolling her eyes.

  “He just wouldn’t understand,” Lala muttered.

  “And what is that which he wouldn’t understand?”

  “I don’t know. Going places. Drinking. Hanging out.”

  Gigi gave a sarcastic hoot. “Bring him along!”

  “No way,” groaned Lala. “That wouldn’t be fun for us anyway. I’d worry.”

  “About what?! It’s just life, sister!”

  “Maybe it isn’t him,” she said, then paused, having thought of it only once she’d uttered it. “Is that what you want me to say?”

  “It’s you!”

  What a can of worms, Lala thought, but it had some truth, some truth that could help her off the hook. “Maybe I just need to keep something in my life to myself.”

  “There you go, sister! You don’t want him all up in all your worlds! Good! Then do it and keep it. That’s my girl.”

  Being Gigi’s girl reminded her of the lifestyle of schoolgirls, how she’d eavesdrop on their talk of all the things they did behind their parents’ backs. All the fun in the world was about violation, deception, hidden things, lies, things kept to oneself. Lala had never gone there. With dead parents there wasn’t much to hide and with substitute parents you can’t quite muster the heart for disobedience. In life, her main goal was to live in whatever mediocre manner was her lot, but to do everything possible not to be abandoned. She had used up her emotional capacity for abandonment.

  So she conjured up a story for the nights that the Gigi impulse won: Lala was going to assist Gigi with the babysitting portion of her housekeeping business.

  “But you hate babies,” said Darius when she announced her first nightly engagement of what she planned as a series, “or was that just ours?”

  Lala took a deep breath. “Look, you, my life is dull. What, do you want me to go out there instead, get another job, get another world, another life instead?”

  Darius thought about it. “No, not really. … So you’ll be in the complex, with strangers’ kids, that is what you want?”

  “Yes,” Lala said. “If by strangers you mean our neighbors.”

  “Whatever,” said Darius, “but I will say this, don’t think I don’t notice you have been acting weird and don’t think that I didn’t put together that it’s been ever since you met that Gigi monster. I see everything, woman.”

  “Don’t start with me,” she said, with exaggerated outrage, grabbing her keys, smoothing her hair, taking a deep breath for a long night ahead of her that she wasn’t sure even merited this tricky campaigning. … “You and your abuse!”

  She left Darius sitting there to contemplate the very American word “abuse,” which he heard all the time, a word designed for criminals on each end of the spectrum, which he suspected meant nothing, which was why he missed the moral of her jab, as usual, attributing it to her new cardboard Americanism. Instead he thought about her going to “work” in those jeans, suddenly wearing jeans all the time—his wife who first set foot on this soil in a suit of perfectly pressed tweed, panty hose, and heels, and a mask of makeup. And here she was over two decades later, still beautiful—well, as beautiful as any man could consider his wife of twenty-something years—but conspiring with time to break down beauty’s last remnants. T-shirts in the house, then jeans outside. God help them and what they had become.

  Outside in the parking lot Lala met Gigi and they hugged, like those very schoolgirls giggling breathlessly and then hushing each other, all red in the face, as if Darius the Dad was lurking just around the corner. They dashed into Gigi’s Honda and sped off to a pizza place/bar where dollar pitchers and jukebox music of whining cowboy men carried them through a night with Marvin. It was a nothing night, nothing much but eating and drinking and talking, and, of course, laughing—she laughed at jokes or sentiments she didn’t understand, or fake laughed at things she did get but couldn’t really get a real laugh out of, or when she felt the urge to put something into the group dynamic where she couldn’t fit words—Oh, never mind, she thought again and again; she was grateful for this life she had gotten.

  It happened that one evening when she strutted out of the house in her jeans, into the parking lot, Gigi’s busted Honda was not there to meet her. Rather, there was an SUV, pulsing with a low bass, presumably from a sound track, hinting of a night out. Inside, a man—dark, obscured by tinted windows, just a silhouette of a large man in his large car—waved at her. She stood frozen, terrified, tried to ignore the driver who had undoubtedly mistaken her. The car honked. She closed her eyes, hoping it would go away. She heard the buzz of rolled-down automatic windows, and the familiar call, “Hell, Lala, it’s me, girl!”

  It was Marvin. She was relieved, and yet … not relieved at all. He had never picked her up. She had never seen his car. In fact, he knew nothing of her pact with Gigi and their secret outing agreement—hence the blasting of music and honk and holler. She waved back hesitantly, and he laughed and honked again, motioning her in. She walked reluctantly over, worried that Darius might somehow psychically or just plain physically discover her secret in an incarnation she never anticipated. …

  Inside, Marvin was laughing to himself and shaking his head at nothing at all.

  “Hello, Marvin,” she shouted, inside, trying to rise above the party music, putting on her seat belt. She was on autopilot suddenly, fatalistically resigning herself to whatever it was the evening had in store for her.

  He slapped her thigh hello, with a chuckle.

  “Where is Gigi?” Lala asked, inevitably.

  “That’s the thing,” he said, refusing to turn the music down, forcing himself to shout back, “Gigi’s home sick. But she didn’t want you to miss an outing! Now that’s a friend!”

  “Oh. Well, you didn’t have to …”

  “Now why did I know you would say that, girl?! No worries, Lala, I love hanging out! Hanging out with you!” He poked her ribs and laughed at her cringing.

  Hanging out, Lala thought. Suddenly it took on a bitter taste. Oh, what the hell was Hanging Out anyway? What did he mean by that? Another bad restaurant, another junky meal, another few rounds of dirty-tasting alcohol and some chatter. What was it about this life that made her want it? Did she want it? Was Gigi another Darius?

  She shook off everything in her head and told herself it was just one night, that she could make it through this one particularly awkward hanging out session. She just wouldn’t reveal her feelings. She would let him talk. He would talk. Maybe he, too—at the worst—would find it awkward and question their hanging out time. At the very worst, he would tell Gigi she was out. At the very very worst, Gigi would stop talking to her and she would lose her “sister.” At the very very very worst, she would go back to her old life with Darius and, she supposed, survive.

  Suddenly, she worried that it would not be possible to survive back in her old life.

 
Marvin interrupted her anxieties by announcing the plan: tonight was “Chingo 2-for-1 Sushi Nite.” The disaster was growing richer, Lala thought, for she had never had sushi, had only heard about its raw, gelatinous, bacteria-ridden primitive horror—oh, she didn’t even know how to hold a chopstick.

  “I’m no good at this,” Lala told him at the entrance to Chingo’s, “sushi, you know.”

  He slapped her hard on the back as he opened the door for her, whispering in an inappropriately overjoyed fashion, “Who is??!!!”

  Once seated, as Lala expected, Marvin did the talking. And the ordering.

  “Please, nothing too, too raw,” she urged him as he paused with the waitress.

  “California roll, how’s that? The crab is raw but it’s also fake,” he told her.

  She looked up at the waitress, who had nothing but total indifference for them.

  “Sounds all right,” Lala nodded miserably, although the only thing that sounded worse than cold raw fish was maybe fake cold raw fish.

  Another problem with Marvin was what she suspected was simply the pitfall of being the talker. Eventually any extrovert had to run out of steam, but the hardest part had to be covering these lapses of conversational impotency with the insertion of randomly generated questions—this was what Lala assumed happened to Marvin when his loud nonsense anecdotes about his day at work, his coworkers, his insurance, his previous jobs, his dream job, et cetera, would suddenly come to an abrupt halt, and there, jarringly, he would insert a question, often highly personal, aimed right at her, so fast as if to trap her in a moment of total inattention, which she was often deep in, but easily enough snapped out of, always somewhat ready for the shotgun turns of his conversation.

  “And it’s all about the 401(k)—you put some years into a place—and that and your health insurance, and I got a PPO—I tell you—and with my exemptions, you figure the state tax, social security—say, Lala, are there any black people in Iran?”