Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  He kept his father out of it for a moment and imagined the prophet with the drama of his Z-name and his headdress and his robe and the staple elaborate beard and his wings. He imagined him waking up one morning, no older than Xerxes, seized by a definite madness but a madness that made him feel more him than he ever had, that cool righteous madness of chosen men, causing him to rise with an endless chain of revelations on his lips, unable to live a man’s normal life with the sudden implanted genius, thus gathering men and women from all over his village, leading them through expansive deserts, teaching them that instead of seeking shelter and shade and water, their true life force would be found in …fires. And then, there under a blazing sun, amid unforgiving dry duneland, in the dehydration and the heat, these mad laughing men lighting fire after fire. No need for rubbing sticks—this prophet would maybe point, extract a wisp of flame from the earth’s star, and there suddenly they would have their lifeline in a paranormal beacon. And not only was it not the last thing they needed, in their location and climate, it was apparently the only thing all along.

  Part Five

  Nights

  There is fire as well and there is desert also but this hell wasn’t his, and it isn’t his either. Whose exactly it is, he isn’t sure, but he’s lost, the classic nightmare: man alone and desperate, equipped with only the useless knickknacks of civilization—clothes, watch, pockets, wallet, change, nothing. Plus a small amount of hope that he will continue to have the strength to walk on and eventually get somewhere to something.

  As it goes, it is very hot.

  As it goes, he is thirsty.

  As it goes, he has been walking for miles and is exhausted.

  And as it also goes, he doesn’t get to that something—something gets to him.

  Desert bandits. Of course, he thinks. Naturally. They are men who look like Darius Adam—his race certainly, but different: they have heads bound in white linen wraps and their wiry bodies are draped in white tunics. They ride horses. They speak a tongue that is like his but not his exactly—he can pick up a few words, but not everything. But when they clutch his wrist he understands, and doesn’t care—the watch, fine. In his situation, time exists bitterly only in that infuriating adornment, he realizes, handing it over. He’d give them his pockets, too, if he could.

  Through a brief flash of survivalist optimism, the kind of consolation that comes only to the direly endangered, Darius thinks to himself: in a situation like this, the proverbial pits, there is no direction to go but that which is up.

  Instead of death, he gets to be dragged atop one of the miserable horses and tied to one of the riders for hours through the desert. There is no sign of sunset—the invisible sun exists only in its force: high and angry and relentless. Eventually there are some tents, then some people, a few herds of animals, even some houses built of something resembling melting clay. Finally, they get to something: an artificial-looking hilltop, where stands a palace, a perfect ivory palace, lined with palm trees and guards, bulbous tower tops gleaming on its shoulders—a classic place of kings.

  They take him inside. He is glad to go. He knows better, but it relieves him to see it: the state. A place of laws—at the very least, a place of decisions. In spite of the dying sensation inside him, he has his curiosity and it soothes him to know he can still feel such a trifling emotion as that.

  Inside, on a pedestal indeed, there sits no king.

  “The prophet,” a servant insists, introducing his master. There he is, bones in a worn tunic, no grander than the nomad bandits, a ragged bankrupt deity lounging on a silk divan—a man surrounded by riches, but draped in poverty. The contrast gives the man an ethereal and yet disturbing cast.

  Beyond him, at the end of the hall, is an opening, an open door thinly cloaked by a gauzy blue cloth. The veil shudders, he notices. He can see that the veil is being touched, lifted even, ever so slightly by a pair and then a few pairs of thin delicate fingers. They are being discreet, the veil just barely rippling from their light fingers and heavy breaths. He squints his eyes to pierce what is barely there and swears he can make out the whites of eyes, many ghost stares. He listens closely and he thinks he can hear beyond the veil too—whispers, soft feminine vocal rustling like silk on satin, sibilant, husky, sweet. He recognizes it immediately: the spoils of conquest, undoubtedly, the harem. The women, the women and children, the women who are children …

  The prophet asks if he can help him, in a voice that is too loud to be anything but a knowing interruption.

  Darius answers that he doesn’t think so, but then realizes that maybe he can. Suddenly his purpose there is clear—he is looking for something … someone …his child, yes that’s it…it’s been ages since he’s seen his child … he is looking for his missing child … the prophet undoubtedly has her, he has taken his child. …

  Your child? the prophet laughs. And who is that?

  Darius, frustrated, trembling, now sure it is true, decides to get bold and yell it, but instead the word comes out like a gasp, as if through diseased lungs and corroded thorax, the word itself toxic: Shireen…and again Shireen, the two syllables sucking up any moisture left in his chest cavity, the name suddenly made coarse and gritty and painful, unlike its true sweet owner. But what can he do but try and try to say it again and again until it comes out, Shireen, Shireen, where is Shireen, do you have my daughter?

  She’s not your daughter, the prophet declares, and with a rapping of his fingers on the armrest, there she suddenly is: his, risen! Out of nowhere, the old dark ringlets, the familiar smiling face, the anomalous but trademark sundress, the inappropriately bare feet, Shireen, waving meekly, Here I am!

  Darius opens his arms to her while she stands there paralyzed in her golden limbs and clean beam like a kid acquiescently trapped in freeze tag—and Darius, too, frozen, stands before her like a crucified madman with arms open wide, amazed to feel tears, the first drop of wet anything he’s felt in years, wet with longing and desperation for his child, his Shireen: My love! Don’t worry, I am here—I’m going to save you!

  The prophet, with an overamused grin, snorts at that. He drops his shaking head into his hands with a couple of dry chuckles, feigning frustration. Darius, Darius. You don’t have a daughter … Darius, where is your SON?

  The very word “son” causes several of the guards to put their hands on their swords; at the same instant a sudden shushing and consequential hush from the harem. The atmosphere immediately becomes taut, with the prophet himself suddenly wearing a tense grimace. The palace feels like a balloon to Darius, pregnant to its maximum with tension.

  Is this happening? Darius wonders to himself, almost thinking himself out of it. His mouth involuntarily opens and out pours, Tell me, am I dead? He wonders if this is that dark hot heaven of Islam, and if he is there because he is there. He looks for Shireen, looks to her for an answer, and when he looks before him, around him, even beyond the veil, it’s empty. No trace of the women.

  Are you dead? the prophet laughs. Ask what you really want. Listen, this is coming to an end, don’t waste it. Go on.

  His son, his son. It hurts to think. But he’s—he’s alive, Darius stammers. I know that. He’s spoken with my wife. He calls.

  The prophet nods again, in an overly thoughtful manner that Darius is sure is mocking. Most of them are alive, you know, Darius. In fact, almost everyone there. We kept them alive. He looks to his guardsmen and immediately one echoes, We did, yes; and the other goes, Yes, prophet, that is how we kept them.

  Darius eyes the guards carefully. They are indeed young men, he notices, practically boys. In fact, they’re more delicate than what one expects of guards, slender, lithe, with fine features, no facial hair, rosy skin. One could in fact mistake them for—

  That’s enough, get him out of my face! the no doubt mind-reading prophet suddenly snaps, putting one hand over his eyes like a visor, as if blocking out a particularly rude sun.

  Immediately, the two guards rush to Darius’s side
, two hands gripping each of his lone arms.

  Wait, Darius insists, I’m not scared of this, you know?

  The prophet drops his hand and with narrowed eyes, hisses, Oh, tell me, why is that?

  Darius thinks about it. He isn’t scared—that was the truth, the foolish truth. But somewhere the thick fog of the dream state is thinning, and consciousness is seeping its gases into the chamber of the subconscious. He wasn’t out of it, but he could sense it was coming, its universe was tiring of him, the atmosphere itself was fading in color and threat, somehow he knew he could get out, and that getting out would be nothing anyway, as it was something he did every morning. …

  The prophet goes on, Darius—his name makes me sick! I don’t do kings, O Darius.

  Darius, your head didn’t come to this, I came to it.

  You left us, we found you.

  You closed your eyes; so now open them.

  But his eyes would not open and somewhere somehow he could feel a conspiracy, like it was timed, that if he stayed here too long he ran the risk of being led somewhere that even waking could not absolve, oh, he was running out of time, it could be only a matter of time until—

  The alarm is going to go off, Darius. It’ll freak you out.

  And in a horrible explosion of accumulated panic—that elevator-dropping, stair-falling, cliff-jumping, semi-epileptic jolt that shakes the shit out of the unknowing dreamer—Darius startled himself to consciousness, yanked his eyes wide open, put his hand hard on the alarm clock “off” button, and got nothing but a moan in response.

  “What the hell?” answered that automatically snappy whisper of Lala’s irritable was-sleeping-now-woken self. She was still used to whispering her screams at night, as if Xerxes were sleeping in the other room.

  “I—I the alarm,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes, trying to piece things together while also trying to banish the bits that were coming to him.

  “The alarm? Oh god, Darius, look at the goddamn clock.”

  He looked at it: 1:35 a.m.

  “Yeah, according to my estimate, bastard, we had another five hours until the alarm,” she snapped, “and we got less than two hours of sleep. You are becoming impossible to live with lately, even more impossible than before!” She angrily flipped her body to the opposite side and willed herself into a hard unsatisfying sleep.

  Meanwhile, that night, that too-early a.m., Darius stared at the clock off and on all the way to sunrise. Two hours, she was wrong about that, he thought—he had actually climbed into bed sometime well before midnight, but remembered the clock making it past midnight last he saw it, and then his head still for another long while moving in circles, shuffling through the unfiled folders of the day’s events, then the weeks, the months of such a troubling time, and yet the themes, the worries, the dilemmas, they were all the same, had been there for a while now, too long, all the unsolvables, unreachable but nameable, the thing in his life that was missing, the one that he’d admit was missing only at that hour when his figure would appear before him, like a mirror whose reflection had been missing for all too long. … In the end, it came only in mirage form—he would never make it as a character—only in essence, the corresponding reality less personal but always infinitely worse, his child mixed in with men he didn’t know, anonymous wars, ambiguous history, eternal bloodshed, consistent violence and overall hopelessness, adding up to vacuums, uncharitable expanses, hot desolate deserts that were his own, sadly, all he and his kind had for landscape within their most secret nocturnal selves. …

  It was at this time—specifically, late in the month of September 2001—that Darius Adam, trusting that he was in his life’s last quarter, had matriculated to the logical finale after his youth’s dreamless era and then his middle age’s nightmare-ridden nights: the abstinence from nocturnal so-called rest that was the conscious mind’s only way of combating the toxic subconscious. He had cultivated a phobia of sleep. What he didn’t consider was how it could be seen as a miraculous act of reverse genetics, for three thousand miles away it was also proving to be the debilitating disease that defined his son’s quarter-century initiation—his son, simply, calling it what it was: fucking insomnia.

  Xerxes couldn’t recall experiencing a full night’s sleep in many, many, many months. Of course he knew he had to have slept somewhere here and there, some tidbits of snooze, just enough to keep the body and head going at a bare minimum, but he couldn’t remember a “normal” night of it. Slowly, over the course of a few seasons he had felt himself fade more and more into a constantly living phantom, an uninterrupted consciousness that existed at a consistent, downgraded vibrancy—lit always, but always dimly lit. The lack of sleep, while it increased the quantity of his active life—if it could be called that, those wasted frustrated hours staring at clocks and praying to the thin air for even a few minutes worth of active-mind shutdown—sucked away at the quality of his life. He was always living, but day after day that living grew shittier and shittier. He never felt the cliché more poignantly—every day we are dying. That was it: without the intermission of sleep, all he had to face was that his heartbeats were running, but running out as well.

  It wasn’t until late September 2001 that he gave up even trying. He simply stopped sleeping for days at a time, not even getting into a horizontal position, not even offing lights, not even trying to kid it. He didn’t want to sleep suddenly—who knew what could happen to the world if you looked away too long?

  And as it goes, it was in this stage of his insomnia that his body and mind—closer to a sort of collapse than even Xerxes was aware of—snapped into emergency mode and began delivering spontaneous bursts of sleep here and there, if just to save him.

  Xerxes called it “passing out.” “Blacking out.” “Fainting.” “Collapsing.” “Uh, I think I was in a coma, officer, what time is it?”

  They were especially strange because the moment the world would go blank to him, boom, he’d find himself in that other world—suddenly, dream life! His eyes would drop like a curtain on his real world and snap—math class, third grade, Mrs. Lynch, but with students he doesn’t recognize, he has to pee—he’d find himself somewhere else, beyond questioning, beyond fighting out of—Arizona, or Mars is it, red rock, Lala arguing, a birdlike dog or doglike bird appears, she screams—beamed deep into it, in a way that almost implied he had always existed in that parallel universe—the motion picture Basic Instinct! Malawi! An animated Eden Gardens! The White House movie room!—but had just failed to tune in to it. …

  —and that’s the way it goes, you know? she was saying, when there he was again suddenly, before a grinning blonde in a tight small sequined pink vest, sheer flower petal pants, perfect ponytail, pretty pink grin. …

  Barbara Eden?!

  She rolls her eyes at him and in a lowered voice gently scolds, Please! Jeannie.

  Right. Geez. Right. He looks around. They’re in a palace of sorts, a palace marblelike, overdone, overprecious, somewhat like a palace constructed out of wedding cake. There’s intricate white tiling on all walls, old Arabic style, all labyrinthine latticework. Somewhere he can hear the trickling of an indoor fountain. It’s beautiful and ridiculous, like being in a museum’s historical re-creation window.

  As it goes, he doesn’t question it.

  Before he can process it all, she pushes him down to the floor. She bites at his collar—oh, wow, a dress shirt he notices on himself, he’s actually wearing a dress shirt and a nice one—breathes hard on his neck, her hands wandering hungrily, her giggles everywhere astray—when suddenly there is a minor wrinkle in the dream, and he feels like it needs to move on, something is about to strike—Shit, he thinks, just give me this episode, let’s just go with this for a second, this was greater than his boyhood dream, in all his fantasies, Jeannie, hell, he never even imagined fucking her—and so the dream maintains itself, tentative-feeling, however, but he doesn’t mind, he helps her unbutton his shirt, even unzips his own pants, tries to get to her clothes, but l
ike that magic that is her vocation, phoosh: her clothes are already gone, she’s already her hairless, bare, blow-up-doll self—Could we even do this? She’s not a human after all, she’s like a sprite or something, no?—and she’s pressing herself up against him and saying things he can’t understand into his bare chest … when, of course, he thinks, the thing that has to end all dreams at the wrong point is going to come, Oh shit, it’s coming, he can feel it—

  Worse than waking up: a bad plot twist. They’re being watched. They’ve been fucking behind a veil, a gauzy white veil that has now been lifted by several rough male hands. All he can see is their pupils, angry.

  Get away from her, he hears one voice.

  You have violated us, says another, and you will be punished.

  Exit Jeannie.

  Before he can fully register this truly grotesque rearranging of a perfectly good dreamscape, there he is with half a dozen guards around him, big men, dirty burly swarthy thugs who are taking him into another chamber. They have to walk down several spiral staircases into a basement of sorts, except when they get down there it’s actually a cave. A dirt cave lit by torches with nothing inside but more guards. What’s happening? his voice is echoing, his annoyance with this world of men and dirt and more men replacing the world of his dream girl and sex inside a wedding cake casa now eclipsed by sheer fear.

  God is going to decide, Xerxes, is the only answer he gets from the chorus of men.

  Finally he hears the footsteps down the stairs, and there are two more guards and suddenly there He is, the He they’ve all been waiting for.

  He’s wearing a turban and a tunic, all in gray or possibly a white that’s just dirty. He has a beard. He is smiling.

  The turbaned man, walking toward him, says, In the dream you come to us, in reality we came to you … came to your country, you remember. …