“And I’m … okay. Okay?”
He never saw the Dallas episode with Barbara Eden in it—when it was originally broadcast, that is. He did see it taped, later. Courtesy of a scrappy, skateboarding, always gum-chewing, teen-years best friend named Sam, who also had an I-Dream-of-Jeannie thing, who brought Xerxes out of the closet with his fixation, confessing to the same, and knowing just how to add the cherry on top with a delectable justification to Xerxes—“You know, fuck that mainstream crap, we’re supposed to be fucking watching Saved by the Bell or Beverly Hills 90210 or some shit, well, we can rebel against their fucking expectation and watch their shows, the fucking p-rents!” They’d argue about whether Samantha’s nose twitch or Jeannie’s nod was more potent (both coming to Jeannie in the end, of course), which Brady would really be Most Likely to Succeed (Sam: Jan; Xerxes: Bobby), which I Love Lucy episode was the last one in black-and-white, and how the theme song from Get Smart went. They were stealing their parents’ past, they argued. This of course left Xerxes a bit uneasy—he never got into it with Sam that it may have been Sam’s parents’ past and his parents’ era’s past, somewhere, but it had nothing to do with his parents’ past. Theirs was something beyond them, beyond TV, beyond any American imagination. …
And of course, Xerxes often fantasized about telling them about Sam—although he never did, because a secret friend was best kept secret, and Sam, well, Sam was pretty unpresentable, with the ripped jeans and profane caps and cuss ticks and the always ready middle finger and the terrible grades in school—and his Sam was a girl Sam, and maybe even his first girl crush.
XERXES: You heard me. Yes, girl. I liked—and like—girls.
Girl! they would have clapped. Girl as in not boy! they would have cheered—had he allowed them their victory, that is—until they’d have decided to go on to something else to pick at with their son and the country he was painting for them, like, say, race or class or the million other problems of identity that loomed even more menacing than gender and sexuality—for them especially, there was always something more to grip.
There she was, suddenly bawling in Marvin’s arms—his safe, non-woman-loving arms, she reassured herself. One day, with Gigi absent again, Lala had gone too far, told him everything. It was his fault—he had gone on about his own lost brother, a brother who had succumbed to illness overnight running down an empty schoolyard track field and just like that, given in to thin air, collapsed, just like that. She had lost it. Lost it entirely, suddenly going so soft there in his arms, in the darkness of his parked car, that he had no choice but to help. He began asking questions, taking notes on receipts, and stuffing them one by one into his wallet. Her maiden N-E-Z-A-M-I was certainly not as common as she thought it was, he was insisting. He said he knew people, people who could do the job, find anyone, anything, in this small—definitely small, he assured her—world. She had looked at him with wide eyes. He had said something about private investigations and other things she didn’t understand, but all she knew was he had ins. She gave him all the information she had. It was, after all, her only immediate relative they were talking about. And this Marvin, with his suddenly comfortable although foreign arms, with his strange ways and untappable background, with his perhaps even empty promises, with his way of not questioning if her brother was even alive, just trusting that when you know you know, for a second gave her something: a flicker, a nudge, barely a taste of something she found as golden as it was toxic: hope.
Almost exactly eight months after his father left him in New York, Xerxes Adam was awoken to the hottest summer day of the year by the invasion of a rather unwelcome mental slide show: visions of that distant prime creator, his mother. Maybe he dreamed of her all night, every night even, who knew? He hoped not. He hoped it was just his conscience in calculation mode, sending the alarm that it was time: Xerxes, time, your mother is waiting.
His mother had now left what he estimated must be one-hundred-and-something messages in thirty-something weeks. The first third had been desperate and urgent and worried. “Please, Xerxes,” she would say, adding, “my son” in a shaky voice that made him feel as if his entrails were melting. The second third: angry, annoyed, acerbic, trickling eventually to a just-pissed snippiness—“And who are you mad at exactly?” she would snap. The third third: cheery, oblivious, delusional, often delivered in the form of five-minute-plus-long diary-entry-like recordings that chronicled her day, just disjointed spewings of whatever was on her mind at the moment, only at the end perhaps tagging on “Maybe you will call” or “This is your mother, wondering how you are, but not wondering too hard, bye-bye,” or like the last one, “Here’s to you being all okay or whatever, shahb-khosh.” It was the type of “good night” that you’d leave a stranger.
She would slam the phone down and turn off the lights. At some point she had decided that calling at her bedtime would be best—they were three hours deeper into the night and so he’d certainly be in at one in the morning, maybe two, hell, three! until midnight her time and she’d give up and force herself to sleep. But not without giving the possibly-pretend-sleeping mass of husband next to her a sharp nudge and lecture. “This is getting crazy, Darius,” she would hiss into the darkness. “What the hell did you do to him? He’s our son. This is something you did, now you get him back. You hear me? He is your son, too, sorry to tell you! You try for once! You call him! And don’t waste it—apologize! Lie even! I don’t care! Just bring him back to life!” He’d mumble incoherently and toss and turn as if to signify some grand struggle. “I am telling you,” she would continue, “some other parents would call the police. How do we know he isn’t, you know …”
Xerxes wondered how she would possibly know if he was dead. She wouldn’t. This was one thing about New York he realized immediately: that to die in this city was to die, the end, click, exit human. No one would gather, no one would fight it or interfere, no one would even notice. No one was looking. And if someone found you, well, fine, you were just another one of the many who died in the city daily—mysterious, natural, unsolved, homicidal, suicidal—whatever, you were a number, and if you didn’t like that, you could leave.
He did not want to leave. These were sacrifices worth making for the city, he had decided long ago. But it did alarm him that perhaps she had resigned herself to thinking the worst, in this third stage of messages—perhaps she did assume he was dead. And perhaps she noted any clues to the contrary—a changed message greeting, at best—as simple surprises, grains of evidence for an alternate universe she had once fought for but eventually tired of. Maybe his mother had done what no other mother in the history of the domestic matriarchy had done in regard to her offspring: abandoned hope.
This barely conscious reflection on his two-thirds of a year’s worth of inhumanity, combined with the sickly stickiness of a peculiarly oppressive 9 a.m. heat, jolted him fully awake, as if from a falling dream. Of all people, why had he shed his mother from his life?
He remembered being a child and being mad at her, her so much more often than him. Because it was she who was constantly stepping into his world, combing and gelling his hair when all the boys wore it messy, wiping his face, fiddling with his shirt, tying his shoes for him, always hollering annoying reminders as he was on his way out, always checking up on him at friends’ houses, always tucking him in with embarrassing, often untrue, admonitions or reminders. You are growing up, you need to think about smelling good now that you are growing up—showering regularly to begin with, because I am about to vomit, and I am your mother. Or the most dreaded: Imagine yourself in the future and think, would my silly behavior today get me there? What would a future wife think now?
Once in a while, in a rage, what would be on constant repeat loop in his head would want to leak out. In his head, the answer to everything, everyone annoying and adult, was the sinister kiddie staple, I wish you would die. Once, to Xerxes’s own adult embarrassment, he remembered being pushed, pushed to say it out loud, though at best in a wea
k whisper.
What did you say?! she had snapped furiously.
I wish you … he had paused, sure he could see a glimmer of tears in her eyes, although in retrospect he thought that any human’s eyes, naturally slimy and liquidy, could look tearful if guilt steered you in that direction—and he had rephrased … I wish you guys would die.
Psychologically it was better for him, but its true genius was in being better for her as well. You guys became the great equalizer. It was suddenly more like, I wish the whole institution of you, parenthood perhaps, would “die”—not you personally.
All she had done was shake her head. She had still tucked him in.
And so he wondered now, too many years later, how at 6 a.m. their time, in their other heat, their dry dull warmth of the West Coast versus his merciless wet dirty big city tropical wave, how he could reach her and soften his blow. He had basically, in his silence, in his refusal to reach out, said to them, I wish I was dead to you. And he had gotten what he wanted: he might as well be.
Plus, this time, his I wish I was dead to you meant to her, not to you guys. For him, he had a whole other style of I wish I was dead. It was more like I wish I was dead, so as not to have ever existed by you.
So when he finally did it that morning—did the dreaded dialing of a number he grew up with, which still seemed so natural with the automatic sequencing of otherwise illogical numbers that he had worked so hard to render unnatural—he didn’t even consider that she might not be the one to pick up.
As life goes, it had to be him. His father, with his usual gruff reluctant “Hello,” that put the emphasis on “hell,” which he was probably conscious of and probably found funny or else apt.
There is no God, Xerxes sighed. Xerxes slammed the phone down, shoving it deep into a drawer as if to pretend it had never happened. He closed his eyes and buried the day back into his pillow.
Three weeks later—a day after the first one-third of September, 2001—he finally called, when life finally gave him a push to put whatever pettiness between him and that number aside, if only for a day, when he knew risking him could no longer be an issue, that he had to, had to more than ever announce himself as living, as one of the many who that day felt like a few, who had lived through it, so far, at least—and through the few dial tones, he said to himself over and over, There is a God, there is a God, oh please let there be a God, and suddenly there she was, answering, without even a “hello,” just that mystical all-knowing mother’s “Xerxes?!” and the first thing he could think to say was the only thing that he knew true in that surreal hell of a day: “Mother,” he declared breathlessly, “I am alive.”
Darius was of course at her side, just barely making out the sounds through the receiver at his wife’s ear. His son’s voice was that usually tinny, high chipmunk garble that phones rendered voices—it could be anyone’s voice, he thought, it all sounds the same, except that it is my son. His son, calling from the heart of a danger he could not comprehend at the moment. He drowned him out, and drowned out his wife’s over-compensating awkward coos and exclamations, and turned the news louder until they both disappeared into the unrelenting dissonance of disaster. On the television, they crumbled over and over, two tall, perhaps too proud, totems of a city, two towers erected to be each other’s image, indistinguishable, somber doubles each dying the same death, neither intolerable when it came to the supposedly inevitable. Over and over, it replayed: one went down, the other stood solo—fast-forward to a new clip: the other goes down just as the first, and nothing. Where his son was it was sunny; it was also sunny where he was. He squinted out the window and imagined the entire sky over America smiling heartlessly. He imagined in his homeland it was almost dark. He thought there was at best only a moon over Iran and he thought how nice that was. He closed his eyes and gone were the repeating images on the television and gone was that blinding brightness and he let the just-so-dark wall of his eyelid melt into the image of the twilight Tehran sky. It was time to go home.
Part Four
Hells
One of the first lessons of adulthood for Xerxes Adam was the function of memory, and how the key to happiness was learning to detach yourself from its many machinations. It was the reason humans were more ghost than mammal. They couldn’t come to terms with memory’s devastating systems: how all things were connected, how one thing was important only in that it would remind you of another, how when things would happen it was not the thing happening that one realized but what the thing reminded one of. The world of things, whether animate or inanimate, past or present, scientific or phantasmagoric, et cetera, was all absurdly incestuous and painfully codependent—many worlds within a small word and too many words within a small world, and so of course there was mostly “hell” in “hello,” of course “eat” lay sandwiched perfectly within “death.” Add human minds and anamnestic faculties to the equation and it was a mess. For instance, whenever he uttered the word “window” he was overwhelmed by thoughts of cotton candy, most likely, he theorized, because the first time he used or heard the word coincided with the first time he tasted cotton candy. Maybe, at least. Sometimes the two totally distinct concepts got so muddled in the fucked-up filing system of memory that they were almost interchangeable—he was gazing outside a cotton candy, in his mouth melted the hairy sweetness of windowhood. This was a good example, he reminded himself—there were bad ones, too. For instance, when someone uttered the word “apocalypse”—or perhaps thought it, while watching the news, inhaling it all and exhaling holy shit, good God, apocalypse!—or when stumbling on the wrong AM station and suddenly there, amid a doomsday sermon, casually, nakedly, just another noun: apocalypse—or when stirred from a potent nightmare of anonymous mass mayhem, the very essence in the subconscious’s manufactured sights and sounds—whenever the notion came up, it was never it that came up, he realized, never just a definitional dead typefaced “apocalypse,” but a chain of its living breathing siblings, literal personal anecdotes, ones he had managed to live through, one at a time replaying themselves like those movie montages that attempt to cinematographically re-create “one’s life flashing before one’s eyes” with their collage of ricocheting images, spliced to some seemingly all-unifying finale song, while flapping through a simulated mind’s eye. This, too, was how it was for him: relentless, automatic, concise, systemic, finite, his apocalypses, entering and exiting at some anonymous prompting, off and on to the beat of their own humanly imperceptible rhythm that was no less random than whatever human membrane, whatever conspiracy of synapses and soul created the dangerously tenuous yet steadfastly elastic daisy chain of memory that always took over the thing, The Thing, itself.
He imagined that one day his memories of Darius would outnumber his actual interactions with Darius—they would grow and multiply and refold and unfold and remind and tease and taunt and poke and probe, until one day sufficiently far away, Xerxes the old man would laugh at them the way adults mock the old cartoon villains of their childhood, he thought, for hopefully one day he might be able to say he was separated from that final interaction—two men in a New York apartment, speechless—by a half century. One day the cases will be closed, Xerxes thought, there will be no need to dish proofs, to footnote fucking nightmares—it will simply stop affecting me. But in the meantime there they were, like eternally preserved crime-scene evidence, particular passages of the deathless past that had been highlighted in the crumpled diary of the mind for so long that, he hoped, all future reality would pale against them.
His first memory came, according to his parents, from an episode experienced by himself as a five-year-old:
Night, and they were on the patio of the home they envisioned an Iranian-raised Xerxes as inheriting. Their neighbors were out in the streets as well. The whole city of Tehran was outside their homes, patiently gazing at the sky. Xerxes was in his mother’s arms—it was a shaky place, her arms adjusting and readjusting, both rocking him and just rocking nervously. His father was at the
ir side. But what stuck to Xerxes the most was the black night sky, perfectly black for star-showcasing back then, because Tehran, as industrialized as it was, was still a long way from sharing the always-lit pink-black of American skies that he would know later. Interrupting the thousands of individually held breaths and eyefuls of aerial black, suddenly the sound of choppers and their respective artificially created initial breeze, and moments later a circle of pink lights, spiraling around themselves, in perfect formation. And then on top of that add the tone and vibrations of his mother’s sobbing and then the echoes of people in the streets, waves of gasps and shouts and moans/groans/something, something defeated-like. … He recalled the sound of women overlapping the sound of men. He remembered his mother choking her way through chants, a strange guttural song of some sort—with repetitions it, too, spun around itself over and over in the breathless utterance. And then just as they came, the lights disappearing right back into the sky … and then the memory folding over itself, until all Xerxes had, years later, was the existence of himself as proof that things went all right that night, in the end.
Several times in his youth, when prompted by schoolteachers with their “first memory” exercises, Xerxes Adam recalled this scene. It wasn’t until he was fourteen, bold enough to question whether it was real or some nightmarescape his strange child’s head conjured, that he asked his parents.
“You can’t remember that,” Darius Adam decided.
“How else would he know?” Lala Adam reminded him.
“Somebody told him,” Darius snapped.
“Nobody could, not here,” Lala snapped back.
“Parents,” Xerxes interjected, sighing with the patronizing faux patience he had learned adults spoke in, “what was it, what am I recalling?”
They didn’t answer until years later when he asked again and his father gave up and rattled off as if it were meaningless, “Antiaircraft missiles. War. Revolution. So what? None of that means anything to you, so, enough.”
Sons and Other Flammable Objects Page 11
