Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  They would clash over only one topic and that was his guardedness, his boundaries, his ultimate compartmentalization instinct. After all, Xerxes Adam believed he lived in two worlds and part of the dual-citizenship agreement was that he could not allow those worlds to mix. He could not risk having Sam even skim his home life, he had decided early on, and this infuriated Sam, who thought Persians are fucking badass and wanted to eat kebabs and shit and ask his father about politics and how the white devils fucked the brown race. What would they think? Just her manner of speaking would be an attack to them; her style of dressing an outright declaration of war against their God; and her relationship with their son an absolutely unpalatable impossibility because as far as they were concerned boys and girls were never just friends, and boys were certainly never more-than-friends with girls like that. On the flip side, he had no way of explaining them to Sam—he could imagine Lala dusting anything Sam touched as if her roughness of demeanor would certainly transmute into actual germs and scum; he could imagine Darius Enoughing at her over and over until he’d storm off with a slam of the door and refuse to see her ever again and perhaps even calls the cops—how would he tell Sam that it was okay, that was just how they were, that coming from a foreign country did that to you, that it was entirely normal in the context of abnormal things?! But not only was the opportunity for rejection ripe on both ends, how could he maintain his double agent status in the face of the two worlds colliding like that? He could not be two opposite things at once. How could he bear to reveal to Sam that he was not the badass, or even worthy of being the real badass’s sidekick, that when his father snapped he cowered, that when his mother looked upset he had to console her, that he would have to talk about her with them behind her back in Farsi—and then at the same time, how would he have the heart to let his parents see that he related to the lonely misfit kids, that he liked abrasive music, that bad words were comforting to him, that inside him there was a dark weird soul that only Sam could access? And what if he slipped up, what if he became the apologetic-weak-cowardly Xerxes with Sam by accident, agreeing in soft murmurs until all the conversation in him melted to simply less-controversial silence—or the other way around, what if he became “X” with his parents, letting a curse or two out, slamming a utensil, kicking a rug, snorting at their outcries! After all, the slipups happened: in school, the Farsi words in his head had sneaked out once or twice to the snickers of his peers, and at home he had almost eff-worded them but had been able to massacre the clause into a coughing fit. It was always hard work, getting the sides of himself straight, he thought every time he adamantly insisted to Sam that the worlds simply could not mix.

  I’ve been grounded all week, were his exact words in translating the dilemma to her. No friends over.

  That’s what you said last month, X! Sam, never a fool, would snap.

  What can I say? Xerxes would grin, assuming that on some level the excuse always ensured a somewhat win-win outcome in scoring bad-kid points with his cohort, I’m always getting into fucking trouble, you know?

  But Sam, being Sam, eventually had to get her way and so he compromised by having her come one evening when he knew they would be away, on one of those nights when Darius was giving Lala driving lessons. The entire hour she was there Xerxes was nervous, watching everything she touched and rearranging it when she was done, worrying that every car he heard outside was his parents coming home.

  She admired the Iranian flag posted on one wall, cooed at the alien Arabic script on the book spines, took extensive note of the Persian carpets and old Eastern china on display in the cabinet … but she stopped dead in her tracks for just one object: a framed family photo on a shelf by the hall entrance.

  For the first time, Xerxes really looked at it, too. There they were, Darius, Lala, and Xerxes at age six or so, flanked by two additions to their trinity: a giant mouse in gloves and a giant duck with a hat. They were clearly at what was known as the Happiest Place on Earth. Mickey had one hand around Lala, Donald was resting his hand on Darius’s shoulder, and young Xerxes was in front of them all, right in the middle. Darius and Lala were grinning in the phony way adults act happy for their kids’ sake, as if they were wholly invested in the word CHEEEEESE! The only being that was smileless in the whole mess was the kid all the smiles were supposedly in honor of, ol’ X himself. Xerxes recognized the look on his younger self’s face: it was sheer anxiety. He looked completely out of place, claustrophobic, wanting out, existentially terrorized, as if about to get shot by a gun instead of a camera. He had never noticed his expression before.

  Sam was clearly noticing it. She tilted her head at the portrait, as if trying to take in all angles. Eventually she went ahead and held it. Xerxes almost asked her not to, but stopped himself as he watched her. She seemed lost in it, totally absorbed by it, and for the first time Xerxes saw Sam’s face go completely soft. If he didn’t know her so well he would have sworn she was about to cry.

  She looked from the portrait to the apartment periphery, to him, and back to the portrait again as if to put it all in context. She looked sick, sad, as if she felt sorry for it all. As if for once she was understanding that he was an altogether other type of “other.”

  “I don’t know,” she suddenly said.

  “What?”

  “Look at you,” she said softly, and he thought that she meant the “you” he used to be, the one in the portrait, but she was looking dead into his eyes. He couldn’t be sure.

  To get in the way of that moment, Xerxes decided to move the tour onward until they got to his room. To try to cleanse the subject, he asked her what she thought of it all.

  “It’s a small place,” she said, politely adding, “but I do like it, X.”

  He began fiddling with his books and his music collection, frustrated at why he didn’t have a single thing she would like, when he realized she was staring at him again.

  He tried to say something he thought she could appreciate. “Got a fucking staring problem, Sammy? Dang!”

  She gave him the finger and he assumed it was all good. But soon her face went strange again and she said in a smaller voice than usual, “You know what would get you in that old photo out of my head?”

  He was shocked. She was really thinking about it. “Uh, no idea.”

  She moved closer to him, as if about to tell a secret. “Well, brace yourself, dude, and don’t be fucking weird about it either, okay, Xerxes …”

  She had called him Xerxes—how could he not be weird? She never did that! But before he could consider what the hell she was getting at, one of her hands was clutching the back of his skull as if his cervical spine was in danger of crumbling into dust. Pause. The other hand made its way onto his thigh. Pause. Her face began getting bigger, moving to his, her eyes began closing, he could feel her breath, he could smell the whole of her, and holy Satan, POW!

  Her lips ran right into his, a bit hard and for a bit long, and it was very horrifically wet. This was how he remembered thinking of it, maintaining that it had to be an accident, sure that she would never do that, and then worrying that the wetness was somehow his and that now she was mad.

  But she wasn’t—she was in another world, it seemed. She was suddenly gazing out the window, well beyond it, to something he couldn’t access. She looked younger or maybe just her age—suddenly he saw their teen age for what it was. It looked lost and small and delicate.

  “Fuck,” she whispered, in her dreamlike state, still staring outside as if for answers.

  “I’m sorry—” Xerxes immediately began, the apology seeming like the logical thing since he simply could not think of what else to say.

  She shook her head, annoyed—the old Sam was immediately back—and she got up, brushing herself off a bit. “Your parents just pulled in.”

  “Fuck!” Xerxes echoed and got up, too, and for a while it seemed like they were just panicking in place. Before he could process it all, Sam was out the door and down the stairs and around the sid
e behind the parking lot, leaving Xerxes to also run for the door. Instead of the door, his frenzied state caused his limbs to get so careless he tripped over one of the very rugs Sam had examined, tripped right over it and right onto the shelf holding that very family portrait Sam had been so taken by. And thus the shelf, also panicked, let itself go and tipped just enough for the frame to fall flat on their faces, everyone of them, mouse and duck and Adams. …

  And the fall was fatal: the frame lay cracked into two pieces, barely maintaining the integrity of the photo it was meant to protect.

  Outside he could hear the first of their footsteps on the staircase, just as he sat there, sweating bullets over the photo with its critically injured encasement in his hands. He was fucked and there was no time—it was a bad combination. He quickly set the shelf upright and tried to prop the frame back up on top of it, but it was no use. The frame, in two, could not stand up as one. Fuckedfuckedfucked, he thought, as the footsteps felt seconds away from fruition. He was a dead man. He let the frame lie on its back, like a pathetic paralyzed thing just waiting to be noticed.

  By the time his parents made their way up, he was able to extract himself from the crime-scene evidence, which was located quite dangerously adjacent to the entrance. The door was still open from Sam’s escape, and Xerxes, numb from all the layers of chaos, was left dumbly standing like a doorman welcoming patrons when his parents finally made it home.

  “What are you doing here?” Darius immediately said.

  “I live here!” Xerxes snapped, stupidly, and speed-walked off to his room. He slammed his door shut and lingered there, holding the lockless knob, listening for clues in the unsafe atmosphere.

  On the other side, they of course talked about him. His mother was trying to say being at the door was no crime, and his father was going on and on about how something was off and how that son of theirs was up to something. Then there were several minutes of very tense silence. He heard something go clink and then clink again—possibly glass—but he was not sure if his paranoia was making it up or if it was real. He felt his eyes sting, he was hot, he was angry, he was frustrated, he was frightened. You did not let the worlds mix, you never let the worlds mix, or else-else-else-else—

  Hard footsteps. He could hear him breathing on the other side of the door, pausing as if he was listening for his son as well.

  Hard knock on his door.

  Xerxes tiptoed away from the door, backing up until he was on his bed, as if he was there all along. “What,” he tried to answer in the most normal voice he could muster.

  The door opened. As expected it was Darius. Darius with his Angry Face, with one hand holding something behind his back.

  “Anything happen when we were gone?” he towered over his son who was kneeling, in what he hoped was a casual pose, atop his bed.

  Xerxes lied not because he was any more afraid of the truth—at that point, he figured he was dead no matter what—but because a lie was quicker, shorter, easier. Two letters: “No.”

  One of Darius’s hands clenched. “I smelled the rat.” His other hand came forward to reveal, of course, the broken frame, with its ill-encased photo looking bent up underneath. Xerxes made out their old smiling faces now suddenly looking absurd, mocking, sinister. Only the young Xerxes’s expression seemed appropriate, wise beyond his situation, oracular even in its anxiety.

  Xerxes tried to think: what was the worst part for Darius? That he had broken the frame? That he had broken that particular frame that held a picture of them as a family? A picture of them as a family in happier times? Or was the bad part that he had had the audacity to touch things when they were gone? That he stirred in the house? Or, perhaps, did he see it as a sign of something bigger? Did broken frame = nervousness = illicit activity = someone had been inside = a girl = a girl like that = a girl like that who had kissed him? Could it be that the faint smell of Sam’s after-school cigarettes were lingering in the house (as it was a smell Xerxes was so used to he could no longer perceive it)? Had his father perhaps brushed shoulders outside with the tiny black ball of girl that wore the scent of his son’s lips? Was it just the look of his lips, were they somehow marked? (He rubbed his mouth absently.) Did fathers just know? But what was there to know? That he had lied? Was this all to showcase his dishonesty—that first he had sneaked home a friend, a girl even, and then he had lied about it, and then he had tried to pretend that frame killing had never happened when interrogated? Or was he just in a bad mood and had found Xerxes victim-ready—was it just one of those times when it could have been anything and nothing alike?

  And why did his father towering over him like that make him feel so scared if it was really just a broken picture frame? What the hell had he done, Xerxes wanted to know, which crime was it?

  “One of the few times we are not home—and we are almost always home—and this!” Darius shouted, letting the frame drop to the ground, adding a fracture or two.

  It was beginning to add up to a threat, that was for sure. The man was making his transformation into monster.

  Xerxes had few choices. He took the first one that came to him and got up from his bed and tried to dash for his door, to dash out and away, from them, forever, to the outside world that in not too long he would belong to, to the girl even, yes, girl, who had just dared to bring him one step closer to becoming a man, to anything but him—

  He fell into Darius’s grasp like a blind mouse who runs into a cat’s open mouth.

  He wondered if this, just like Sam and him bumping lips, was more than an accident—was he running out to run to him? Was it an escape or was it suicide? Or was he trying to strike first? He could not understand it. What made him think he could topple the Empire of Darius at that moment, he could not fathom. …

  Darius had him helpless. One of his hands was tight around his wrists and Xerxes could feel his father’s hot furious breath on his face. “NEVER,” he was saying again and again and the more Xerxes struggled to break free the more his father struck him. Again and again, like the fists in movies, they moved that fast, and he could not tell if he was hitting back, except something had to be making it continue, something had to be doing it, why else would he, would a, would someone who was, why else would a—

  “Dad!!!!!! STOP!!!”

  Xerxes could suddenly hear his own voice screaming like a madman, as if separated from his entire body and self, a runaway scream that was never-ending. And like the movies, the cartoons, just as it got really bad, just as his eyes took the worst of it and turned his scream into a howl, just then he got that famous break: he saw stars. Stars, as if some absurdist reward. Not like the ones in the sky, but the way they would look up close, just right in front of you, he thought. All white-hotness, a vacuum of light, the color of fire. He was grateful for it because it was around the time of the stars that it stopped and he was alone in his room again.

  They did not speak about it. In the future, he was again left alone at times but never again did he mix worlds, and never again did he see stars like that. He promised himself he would just endure the next little bit of high school, do the very best he could, be scholarship-worthy, grant-worthy, worthy of the help of strangers with resources and institutions, and when it was time, when senior year and age eighteen would arrive with the promise of conventional outs, he would run out, run as he did when he was a kid out of the passenger seat of Darius’s car and into the playground where he could lose himself, lose them as well—but this time he would run farther, run as far as the stretch of land that created the length of the country made possible.

  In the meantime, he pledged to take the hard times like a soldier, but a soldier whose term was dwindling. And for that week after his first kiss, after the stars, when he walked around school with the very wrong misplaced badges from that experience—two tender dark purple bruises around each eye—he made the best of it. He tried to humor it in the gym mirror, tell himself he finally looked like a tough guy. A man. But he knew that while a few kids and
a teacher asked and bought his bullshit answer—Oh, just play fighting with a cousin got out of hand—Sam did not. Because Sam, whom he spent almost every free hour with, as much as she did see, she knew not to ask.

  In Farsi, the insult pedarsookhteh means something like “bastard” or “asshole,” but literally translates to “father” (pedar) + “burned” (sookhteh), or “burned father.”

  The one time Xerxes saw his father hit his mother, he remembered it was the only word she uttered, as she just barely attempted to back away from his sight, like an ambivalent animal, in something like a whisper, after the blow.

  Then there was the memory that was all about Lala, the veracity of which she fought tooth and nail. As a rule, she emphatically bowed out of any notion that implied she was a coconspirator in the early screwing up of Xerxes’s emotional health, but this one especially irked her. You think I am one to deny bad things? I who was brought up and out of the worst thing possible? Don’t forget. This was her most potent point.

  She seemed to imply memory was a realm much like an Opposite Day masquerade ball, where dreams dressed up in reality drag.

  But to Xerxes it couldn’t have been a dream because A) too many senses were employed B) his mother was never in his dreams, thankfully C) his dreams never involved linear narrative D) he did not like to replay bad dreams—what was the point—particularly when that particular space in the head/heart/whatever could be more than occupied with all the very bad real things in life.

  And this memory replayed in his head a lot.

  He didn’t like Lala denying it because he saw the moral he extracted from the incident as highly central to his emotional under-development. The moral was in a sense Lala’s, ironically. This was Lala’s lesson in metaphysics, Lala’s lesson in super-psychology—Lala who had warned him of the dangers of the too-potent imagination, the recklessness of phobias, Lala who had said the words audibly, with ample premeditation, almost rid of her usual accent, lucidly, truly, intensely deliberately enough for the words to be forever etched in what should have been stone, but instead was just a child’s paper-thin origamic conscience.