Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  CLIMAX: Look what your fear has done, those six words the mother had said, and again, Oh, look yourself, you, you, look what your fear has done, look what your fear has done to us!—leaving the child wondering how many other times that sentence had been uttered in human history and how many more times it could afford to be uttered again.

  BACKSTORY: When he was very young, even younger than when the story began, he used to be very scared of some things and at the very pinnacle of those feared things: bright things in the sky. Helicopters, planes, fireworks, a particularly vivid moon, leftover gashes of a particularly toxic LA sunset, supposedly natural glowing errata of the sky (Perhaps aka UFO’s? he often wondered), et cetera—no, he didn’t like them one bit. Darius’s theory was that it reminded him of his early infant memories, perhaps those air raids in Iran, et cetera—he was a child of war, after all. It was no excuse, Darius would tell himself, but the child had to have gotten such a stupid phobia—ah, annoying, the phobia of a light in the dark, whereas most normal kids just have the dark!—from somewhere after all. Lala didn’t theorize, just disapproved very passionately of anything she felt could be above her theoretical talents. She questioned her son again and again when he would suddenly burst into tears, pointing, then covering his eyes, at the most innocent of all things, truly, just an interruption in all that night sky.

  What, you think the sky is shot or something? she would ask. Please!

  Oh, is the beautiful perfect black blanket torn, is that it?

  Uh-oh, somebody lost a killer diamond in all that murk?

  Oh, look, I’m a little speck of alien and all I’m going to do is hover at you, right? Ha. His earnest gaze drove her mad. Laugh!

  He did not like the condescension one bit, so after a while he did not explain. Usually, that is. But one time that he did, that he felt he had to, he cleared his voice and said to her, employing every sprouting grain of premature adulthood that he could enroll: “Mother, look, as inconceivable as it may be, I am only worried there is an aircraft of some sort, perhaps hijacked, perhaps experiencing mechanical failure, that is perhaps on fire, and perhaps just erratically flying due to being in the wrong ill-conceiving hands, that may be headed for our city, the greater Los Angeles area, a prominent one, or one of our city’s major monuments or symbolic structures, and may accidentally hurt us in its crash, or at the very least, someone we know, or even at the very very least just happen to happen—isn’t that, my current worst nightmare, bad enough? That is all.”

  She gave him a parent laugh, a laugh that said, Oh, children and their absurdities, but then in a lowered voice added that there was no point in thinking such crazy things, because what if the crazy things did happen, what would he do with himself and his head then, had he ever considered that?

  He hadn’t.

  STORY: He was young, head at best just reaching his mother’s hip. It was night and his father was away, as he usually was in the early evenings of his childhood—night classes to teach, errands to do, away in some other world desperately annexed to his work world to add some dimension beyond father and employee. Mother and son were alone, after dinner, both curled numbly by the TV, eating snacks, flipping channels, Lala often nodding off during commercial breaks, he fake coughing her back to life, she sometimes asking an idle question about school or friends just to let him know she was there, him grumbling and mumbling answers back. Back then life was very boring, he remembers recognizing even then. But after that night, when life said Ha, you find me boring, do you, then take this, O bored ones, I’ll show you what boredom looks like with its entrails pulled out of its anus with a neon stick, take that, you want boredom, I’ll smear you in the toxic shit of adventure, you want that, I’ll give you a supersonic nuclear urine-flushed swirlie down to the scatophilic-dream-depths of thrillsville, O too-content human—after that night, should the night have truly transpired, he was destined to long for the comfortable vacuum of anti-event for the rest of his life.

  It was likely that they were watching I Dream of Jeannie and that Jeannie had, perhaps in that same moment they were distracted, done something to annoy Master very much, something that Master by that point, after years of living with such a magical woman, must have known was fixable, but something that nonetheless merited his boiling point at the climax of that half hour of their fake lives.

  In any case, as if on cue, they were suddenly both turned to the window, mother and son. He was pointing, one hand covering his face, but eyes still peeking through the slits of his fingers. He was saying, Look, look, look, it happened, Mom, look what happened!

  She had said something like So?—an Americanism she had picked up from him, that implied not caring and annoyance, but was closer to the latter than the former, and in some cases, like this one, meant the very opposite of the former, a short verbal front designed in the tradition of juvenile Opposite Day philosophy, that the adult world often had to dip into to stall the oncoming horror of … horror.

  He resented that So?

  He remembered a dark sky, more purely black than Los Angeles usually mustered, a pure velvet ebony designed possibly to show case that imponderable imperfection: a thin white streak, which with its ever-elongating streakhood became more and more jagged and appeared almost feathering—if something white-hot and clearly burning could ever be described as possessing properties of feathering or flaking things even—at least coming apart, a disintegration that topped the thing’s own creation in its brilliant horror … oh, Xerxes, it had happened. In the sky, there it was, his fear, certainly—if not a spaceship or some combustible planet or God, hell—an aircraft was bursting into flames.

  Look look look! was all he could say.

  And she was looking silently.

  He imagined the silence punctuated only by Jeannie’s laugh track, the dumb jingle of miracles via her bobbing blonde ponytail, the holler of the ever-irascible Master.

  And then something set her off—maybe a child’s routine madness now finally taking the form of a most distinct clairvoyant sanity, the TV’s obliviousness, the silence of the aerial holocaust outside, their utter loneliness in its beholding as if the thing itself had appeared just for them—something set her off and that something made her say it. And because Lala would not admit to the event, much less the utterance at the time of the event, we will never fully know why.

  She said, Look yourself. And she said, Oh, look yourself, you, you, look what your fear has done, look what your fear has done to us!

  On the one hand, it was true: what else could create the actual actualization of a half-developed being’s worst nightmare—what could render rationally existent the most irrational of dreamscapes? He had—somehow—done it.

  On the other hand: sometimes the worst nightmares of children exist because they are pieced from the larger-than-life realities of human existence. He had imagined it because it could happen, because it was inevitable even, because why not? Probability dusts the glitter off coincidence’s shoulders.

  On the other hand: the odds of their actually witnessing it, the son and the mother with the son with the vision—that was a bit much, no? He had done it—he: psychic, evil, prophet?

  One the other hand: what an evil, sick thing for a parent to imply! Whether he had or hadn’t!

  On the other hand: it had never happened. Children have remarkable imaginations, so remarkable that not only do they imagine incredibly horrible things, they can imagine themselves imagining incredibly horrible things, and these visions are so real, that later, in adult life, they still suspect them to be true. In terms of magical thinking, one can then infer that the vision (as a concept) continues to haunt the unwitting accomplice (mother) just as much as the possibly delusional vessel of those visions (son), as if to reap some vindication in the potentiality of some osmosis between the young human imagination and horrible global cataclysms. It was therefore possible that it never actually occurred, but was rather something he had inflicted on them, just an imitation of life that, like ciga
rette smoke, hovered vaguely in and out their minds, insubstantial but intoxicating nonetheless.

  On the other hand: he knew something real had happened by how tormented he still was by the piercing hold it had on his mental life, and he knew, further, by how upset it made Lala to even hear about it, that whether dream or reality it was a very bad event/very bad dream, and that because in the world these two things can be considered just a backslash apart, so interchangeable, so almost synonymous, and both divisible by that common factor, memory, the episode was validated as a milestone in his mental life.

  Lala’s parents met in the cafeteria of the Atomic Energy Corporation of Iran, which employed all of Lala’s employable relatives, she told him once. That was one of the few times she ever mentioned them to Xerxes. She stated it factually, without emotion, without insinuation. But this only added to Xerxes’s nightmare of these two perfectly frozen twenty-something sweethearts, these stillborn grandparents of his, locking lips in a sterile auditorium meant for a food break, intoxicated by love on top of an unimaginable ticking monster that he had to consider, that although no one would be able to guess what generation—not children, maybe not grandchildren, maybe not even great-grandchildren—could one day kill or harm at least one of their descendants.

  If they could have forbidden her they would have, but thanks to Xerxes’s knack for covert operations—always outside the House of Adam, he made sure—Sam remained a ghost to Lala and Darius Adam. But before high school graduation would force them to part, she would become a ghost to Xerxes Adam as well.

  He drove Sam home for the last time, on one of the rare occasions of Darius’s day off when Xerxes got to drive the family car to school.

  It was a day when Sam seemed fragile. She quietly took out some matches.

  “You can’t smoke in here, you know that,” Xerxes said more gently than usual.

  “I know, dipshit,” she snapped, “I’m not going to smoke. I’m going to. …”

  “What?”

  She struck the match and produced just the feeble flame intended for her to nudge with a finger—so what, a kid’s trick, he told himself—then a hand—stupid Sam, she’ll stop, he told himself—and then down to her wrist—“Sam,” he cried, “Sam. STOP.”

  “Kick me out then,” she said, “It’s my fucking life, X.”

  “Sam,” he sighed, not knowing what exactly to add. He tried to slow down, after he ran a fresh red that he could have sworn was still at the tail end of yellow. He settled on a grumbling, “That’s such a cliché anyway.”

  Since they had gone deeper into their teenage years Sam had started to get miserable all the time, talking like the bad youth of bad TV movies, quoting lyrically destitute rock lyrics, even referencing old dead depressed French surrealists she had never read. And so it became a matter of time before their friendship was at a sad dwindle. She became the last thing he needed, one more school friendship lost, one more person he had lost all hope of communicating with.

  Years later, he wondered what telling her he loved her would have done to that equation.

  “I don’t deserve fucking anything,” she would tell his rolling eyes.

  “Sam is dead,” she would declare to his firmly turned back.

  “I see myself and I don’t know myself,” she would whimper in his car to ears that would shut then if they could. It had become a mantra of hers and mantras did not suit Sam.

  One good thing: she didn’t kill herself as everyone seemed to expect. She burned a floor of her family’s house in a strange rage one early morning but no one was hurt and it was ruled an accident. She threw a glass vase at her mother’s face and shot her sister in the leg with a BB gun. She called her gym teacher “bitch” to her face. She saw counselors, social workers, therapists, psychiatrists, coffee shop sages. She got suspended, grounded, expelled, fired—she dropped out, quit, went back again, got out, cut corners, jumped all ships, everything, eventually, every time.

  Meanwhile he dealt with his friendlessness by thinking forward, sweating bullets for the future, studying like someone who cared about his studies, forcing himself well above his natural averageness to honors with punishing hours, committing himself to allnighters over trigonometry exams and SAT practice questions as if his life depended on it—because it did, he reminded himself. And when it came time to apply to colleges, he applied Early Decision to one that could have been any one, good but not great, small but not exclusive, liberal arts but not artsy, but the one he knew would take him, the one he knew would offer the most money, the one who wanted his sort of minority, the one he knew was the farthest away. He got in and when it came time to share the news, he walked the acceptance letter over to his parents, prefacing it by letting them know it wouldn’t cost them a cent, emphasizing that it was Early Decision and that was final. They received the news with glum faces, confused, maybe even shocked that he had been able to pull off an escape without their suspecting it. In that moment, he missed her, the best friend he had shared all adolescence with, whom he had even dared imagine a future with—he had imagined her still being there, the old her, and how they’d jump up and down and make gleeful air guitar you rock gestures over his acceptance and how Sam would no doubt conjure a plan to piggyback his move and he would have her some more. Instead, he had let her get lost, somehow he had allowed her to lose herself as well, and there she was like she almost wasn’t, alive to him in neighborhood gossip alone.

  They never had anything in common, he tried to tell himself, except for something outsiderish. What are you when you are outside even the outsiders?

  But in her nihilism there had always been an indelible wisdom that hit home for him, because well after he dropped her off that evening for the last time, dropped her off and lost her forever, her mantra I see myself and I don’t know myself this time somehow stuck in his system for too long a time, like old gum in the gut. He shut himself up in his bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. For the first time, he really looked. Literally, saw himself. And separated himself from his reflection, the idea that he was even human, and just looked at the form, what the form was, what the form had become, how the form existed. And did not know himself: the tentacle-like fingers, the arbitrary length of the limbs, the jelly quality of the ass, the hard musculature of the abdomen, the on-and-off flashing blue veins of the neck, the craters and cracks and pinpoints of the maddeningly imperfect epidermis, the oily wiry growths of haphazardly sewn-in hair follicle, the shell-less mollusks that were the ears, and the two lockets of white slime that held—ughhh!!!—the element he had no choice but to recognize as his … the exact, dark, flashing, no-doubt-about-it spheres of his closest double, the very eyes of Darius Adam! He turned off the lights and ran out.

  Damn that Sam! He promised himself that he would never ever consider his existence so comprehensively again.

  They did not talk. But several months after 9/11, his father wrote him a letter, his first attempt at reconnection. It was also the first time he had received a letter from his father, ever.

  He read it only once. It was all he could bear, and then he folded it up back into its envelope and put it under his bed, just as he did when he was a kid with terrifying things like Ouija boards, that he didn’t want to deal with but didn’t have the peace of mind to discard.

  The letter did not acknowledge anything. Not their breach in communication, not the global events of the last several months, nothing. It was full of the irrelevant and unpredictable, as he would expect.

  He said, The weather is good here. It always is. I assume right now it is not where you are.

  He said, I have contemplated adopting a dog.

  He said, Well, what can I tell you? Maybe you will tell me what you want me to tell you?

  He said, You see the drawing on this stationery? It’s Zoroastrian, did I ever tell you about it? I used to consider becoming a “moobad.” That is a Zoroastrian priest. There are temples in Southern California. Zoroastrianism is the oldest religion in the worl
d, origins in ancient Persia in 1000 BC. The symbol for Zoroaster was popularized by King Darius—it’s a sun disk—a sun with wings—attached to the prophet’s image.

  He said, Have you spoken to your mother? She has news. It’s big stuff. I will let her tell you.

  He said, I have dreams about a daughter born after you.

  He said, I resent writing you this letter in English. I hope Farsi is in your plans soon.

  He said, I am planning on going to Iran. It would be a good place to meet. Your mother is not interested.

  He said, That is all. Feel free not to respond, as I predict anyway.

  It was a challenge, of course, he knew, the entire letter was, and he had already made sure he had won with the last line, because if Xerxes were to act according to his will, his father would be right. He decided he would let his father win. He had learned to choose his battles. He consoled himself by considering that a win in itself.

  The stationery was from a Zoroastrian temple in Westminster, California, it said. Indeed, there he was, the figure of a bearded man with wings, encircled by the sun’s beams ostentatiously starbursting around him. Xerxes had seen this before—while his father had never mentioned wanting to be a “moobad” before, books on Zoroastrianism did exist in their house. He had never asked. Underneath the prophet’s feet in feeble script it said the words “Eternal Flame.” It had some resonance for Xerxes—all he remembered about his father’s occasional mentions of Zoroastrians was that they were fire worshippers. The key to salvation for this winged prophet was apparently fire. Beautiful, he thought to himself. … Terrible, he also thought.