Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  He doesn’t have too much room to play with, Xerxes notices—the cave is small and the man is now getting closer than, say, two men in an office cubicle would ever get.

  To your city, you will never forget. …

  He is so close they could shake hands, Xerxes registers, noting that he can feel the man’s very body heat. He’s hot, like a heat lamp, like an August beach day, hell, like an unfiltered sun—Xerxes actually finds himself worrying he could get burned.

  Just down your street, did we not …

  Thankfully, he stops just short of his face. Xerxes, as much as he tries to memorize every line, every feature, every distinguishing facial characteristic, is destined to wake in a few moments, remembering nothing of this man’s mug—the man will appear in turban and tunic and even beard, but completely and utterly faceless.

  Were those your people? he asks. Some would say I am your people.

  Of course, he would have his theories as to who the man was. He would understand why at that very moment another heat would be suddenly coming from within his own self, canceling out the man’s threatening bodily air of apocalypse, why suddenly deep within him he’d feel a boil, the rage of several thousand men, enough for an army, men and women, all strangers of, yes, his city, his country—if it was his country—in one of his heads, twisted dream life or simple thoughtscape, he’d declare, I am not a fool, I know who you are, where you come from, at the very least, and it’s close to me, close to where I come from, yes, but aside from that we have nothing in common, and you are not going to destroy me, you have no chance, in this, I can turn you back in a second, poof, and then none of this, none of it, it’s just a—oh fuck it!

  Just as he was vanishing away and Xerxes was rubbing his eyes furiously to get to reality and face the all-absolving day, he heard the faceless turbaned man’s last words, residual dream afterthought, leaking paranormally into the virgin daylight of real waking life: But, Xerxes, it happened.

  For weeks he would struggle to will himself back into that dream. Suddenly he didn’t want the insomnia, but the insomnia had him. Not only could he not sleep, he just couldn’t dream properly. Soon enough he’d collapse into his usual sporadic bursts of nonsense dreams, falling dreams, a sex dream here and there, none of them amounting to more than a few minutes at a time, when all he wanted was to be back at the moment of face-off in a cave far far away.

  The one time he got close—he is in a rural region, following a young girl, painfully young, no more than ten maybe, slightly resembling the young child version of a woman, a woman he had somewhere met, a pretty dark-curled thing, in a sundress, skipping barefoot on sand and dirt, telling him to hurry up, claiming she could show him the way, and indeed eventually taking him down, down, a dirt path, into, yes, precisely, a cave, with a heat he decides is familiar—the phone rang, jerking him with migraine-inducing violence out of his dream cave.

  Fuck me, he thought to himself. He grabbed the phone, without saying a word, furious that he wasn’t one of those people who unplugged their phones at night—after all, he with his insomnia, these few moments here and there were precious—

  “Xerxes, did I wake you?” of course it had to be his mother.

  He groaned. “Well, yes. Yes, you did.”

  “That’s good! That means you were sleeping.”

  “True. Briefly. Yes.” His ears were ringing, his hands were trembling. He tried to cancel out the strident Mom-talk with the strange yet soothing familiarity of the girl in his dream.

  “If you had a job, you’d be up by now,” Lala Adam thought it useful to point out.

  “Nobody has a job over here right now, Mother. Please don’t start on that.” It always went back to that, the sorest of sore subjects. What she didn’t seem to understand was that it bothered Xerxes, too. He had, after all, done his part: gone to an average liberal arts school, picked a degree that sounded innocuous and yet multipurpose and general enough to get him to more than one place should he ever decide where that was, got the BA in communications that they told him was good or good enough, graduated with a B/B– average that was supposed to be worth more than average or below average. But since he had graduated life had been a mess of temp jobs, long and short, only: administrative assistant, executive assistant, office manager, circulation assistant, production intern, creative services associate, transcription, consulting, data entry, reception, customer service. Jobs would end and he’d have to wait for a new call; he’d get hired for a month or two but before insurance could show its divine face, layoffs would ax him, or he’d simply be in a trance of boredom and mediocrity at work, it would show, he would get fired, always well ahead of the point where unemployment dollars could pad the blow in the aftermath.

  His mother, who refused to understand the work world, would never fully buy it. “Well, obviously many people there do work, or at least several thousand did, as we saw with certain recent events, and if they didn’t, well, they’d be as lucky as you—I don’t want to speak about that actually.”

  “Neither do I.” In every phone call since the event, she had found some unbelievably crass way to allude to it, always apologizing for it, always somehow managing to insult him further with her apology. She had no idea—he could excuse her, because she just had no idea.

  “Xerxes, I just called to tell you about the hell I am going through and maybe then you could get over feeling bad about what’s going on there.”

  He groaned and she began her long list of no-good-this and -thats: her blood pressure skyrocketing, their horrible mounting debt, the pains of menopause—

  “Okay, okay. Thank you, Mother. You think it makes me happy to imagine your life is hell, too?”

  It made her pause. “One more thing.”

  He considered hanging up. It was the one more thing that he always knew was the real reason she’d called.

  “Your father.”

  Xerxes was speechless. She normally knew not to go there.

  “You know, Xerxes, he’s … well, he’s really losing his mind this time.”

  Xerxes tried to distract himself with anything. “Mother, I have to go now, please. I have to start … my job hunting today, breakfast, stuff, you know.”

  “The other day he mentioned going to Iran. He does not sleep. He talks nonsense. He shakes, always sick. …”

  “Please, I have to go.”

  “Xerxes, maybe if you could—”

  “NO. I have to go. Please, leave me alone. Please do not force me to shout at you. I don’t—” and as if in a stroke of magic, a flourish of miracle, the phone decided to drop itself, without anything more than strictly psychic help from him, managing to furthermore land itself square on its clicker, with a resolute clang. When he picked it up, ready to worthlessly apologize, all he got was the dumb drone of the dial tone that he supposedly wanted all along.

  Having a woman in his bed didn’t help the sleep problems, he had to admit, but all in all, Xerxes was happy it had finally happened. They said sometimes it took a tragedy to bring people together, and so, suddenly, there she was, as if concocted from a deep delirium, her head on his pillow, a big brown mess of kinks and curls and thin skin and artificial flower smells and sometimes even reflex-like kisses. Or more. She was a healthy sleeper. He would humor her by lying down with her at night, but once her breathy half snores kicked in—if that barely-there motorlike purring of sleeping women could be described as snores—he would rise and tend to something. Usually it ended up being the worst things, like those endless hopeless piles of New York bills. Can’t they absolve this suffering city of that shit for a month or two? he wondered. His bank account went from anorexic to cannibalized to overeaten of sci-fi proportions that September—oh, for the vibrant optimistic scenes of kittens and butterflies, balloons and palm trees, watercolors and Technicolor, on the face of those cash advance checks, as if its subscribers could believe it was a Monopoly ticket to invisible millions, as if they had forgotten it would remember them again once it had been dou
ble- and quadruple-dipped in the acidic invisible ink of interest. Talk about apocalypses. No, with a life like that, Xerxes was never bored—there was plenty of wreckage in his head to make busywork while the sleepers had their night.

  When it would get too close to dawn he’d crawl back in, pretend he’d been there all along—sometimes she would know better, and he’d think, Strange, this creature who doesn’t even know me, but yet is on to the reality of my sleep habits—and bury his face in her hair and its hair products and be thankful. He knew he wasn’t alone in acquiring a bed buddy—he was just glad he wasn’t the exception in that season of paramedic partnerships. It had spread through the city like a most desired virus: singles haunting bars to find not just flings but companions, the heyday’s speed-dating sextravaganzas suddenly morphing into support-group-style coupling, fuck-buddies being fine but replaced by the finer and fewer who could play monogamy if not marriage, the desired dating being the dating that verged on holy matrimony, that said constant, that said forever, that said life not just love. The most desperate and vital and delusional emergency “love” was in the air. …

  It took some time however. On the evening of September 11, it was safe to say this was the last thing on his mind when he first found her on his rooftop, when he had finally dared to face the unfiltered skyline.

  She was sitting in the manner kids call Indian style, a tan tiny thing in a red calico dress that was stretched modestly over her knees. She was totally still, except for the effects of the evening breeze that made her curly dark hair move with an intimidating wildness. He had expected the rooftop, seven or so hours after the event, to be flooded with people in tears, holding hands and binoculars, crying, maybe even drinking to a bad miserable drunkenness. But this female—woman or girl, he couldn’t tell—was all there was and so he cleared his throat with a theatric harshness in hopes that it would make her turn around.

  It did.

  Two outrageously large dark eyes met his. She was almost all eyes—later, for the life of him, he could not remember her lips (were they lipsticked, were they thin?), her nose (big? upturned?), the shape of her face (egg? heart?)—just her eyes and that unruly tiara of twigs that was her dramatically unkempt hair. Even looking right at her didn’t help determine her age—she could be nineteen, she could be thirty, he thought. Most likely lost somewhere in between, like him, he hoped.

  “Hi there,” he said awkwardly—realizing they were the first words he had spoken to a live person that day, the second person at all, period, if he could count the phone call to his mother—adding immediately when faced with his awkwardness, “I’m sorry. I just came to … look.”

  She turned back to where her view had been directed before, the end of their world, the waterside, and—as if the water’s head was steaming with demons—the great tower of dark smoke that bruised the late summer orange skyline like the most egregious metaphor’s clotted lyric.

  Finally, she turned around again briefly. “Breathtaking.” she said simply and that was her only word. She turned again to the spectacle, this time with her head tilted downward, and didn’t say another word as long as he stood there with her. Which wasn’t long at all because after fifteen minutes or so the awkwardness really hit him, and he realized that was all their world was to be in the next long while—however long healing really took, who ever knew—everyone would be awkward, wanting to connect with one another for the sake of that shared milestone, longing to express and overexpress the deep truth within the surface melodrama of how none of them would ever be the same after that, needing to bring it up to anyone and everyone, all their blood brothers and sisters, the citizens of The City, the spectators of its fall … and possibly realizing, just as before, the sad disappointing truth that nothing had really changed though, had it—they were all different and all alone and would live and die, alone, even if all together, with one another, in a warningless blast, in a crumbling staircase, in a flame, in a fall—alone, awkward, much as they lived. It killed Xerxes just to think about it.

  So, weeks later, in a brief unsatisfying spell of sleep, when he dreamed of the young girl in the sundress leading him down into an Afghan cave—for the answer, for the retribution—he knew it was her. A younger version of her but the same desert-sunbaked skin, the wispy insufficient sundress, the feral corkscrew mane, and the eyes. My God, he thought, the eyes.

  For the first time since Barbara Eden he had dreamed of a living woman he did not know. Although unlike Barbara Eden, she was someone he had met before. And he would meet her again—although when their next meeting took place, he would suddenly forget he had known it would—the rooftop episode a blur, more dream than the image deeply ingrained in his head of holding her child-self’s hand as they wandered into some Hades of hers.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, with the total ease and confidence of a normal real human being just going on with her life naturally, when he ran into her at the Indian-owned bodega down the block.

  “Oh wow. I know you … from …,” he exclaimed, without choosing his words, just dumbfounded, forgetting that in his basketless hands he was juggling a typical outing’s worth of eccentric “groceries”: toilet paper (the cheap thousand-sheet, single-ply kind), foot odor powder, and microwavable hot dogs.

  “Yeah … you live in my building.” In her basket were nicer items—he looked down to avoid her eyes, suddenly getting a flash of her in that toxic sundown, her and her single stunning “breathtaking”—she had jam (plum), a box of Frosted Cheerios, a carton of soy milk, a bar of soap (some nameless, brandless New Age kind the Indians sold), a Brita water filter, and laundry detergent.

  He nodded slowly and put his stuff down on the counter at checkout. “Oh, you can go first,” he apologized quickly. “I mean, I was just putting my stuff down, I had no basket, please, you first—”

  “It makes no difference. Go head. I have a basket.”

  He nodded gratefully. As the old Indian man silently rang up his purchases, he turned to her and extended a hand, “Xerxes. Xerxes Adam.”

  To his surprise, it made her giggle. “What a name—sorry, no, I wasn’t laughing at it,” she clearly laughed on. So what, he thought. Oh, he was used to it. People, women, whatever, they’d sometimes laugh at his name. He wouldn’t even bother, the way he used to in his late teens, ready to be defensive, to give them a lesson in Farsi, to go on and on about what it meant, the kings, the history, his heritage. Better left unsaid. He’d rarely even feel ashamed of himself when he’d just nod along with their “what a name” mockery.

  He paid, got his receipt, and had nothing to do but linger. A mistake to go first, he realized, now I’ll just have to hang around like a creep until she’s done. Or if I walk on and leave, I’d seem rude. But we are, after all, conversing—aren’t we? He was just relieved that his embarrassing purchases were covered with bags.

  “Well, I’m Suzanne,” she said, as they walked out.

  “Nice to meet you, Suzanne,” he mumbled, still looking down at her groceries, still looking more dignified than his though bundled in the same white plastic bags, just sitting in them better, more neatly, more comfortable, more adjusted. He knew part of his fixation had to do with wanting to avoid her eyes, which he remembered all too well, and worried about re-recognizing. For a second, he panicked to himself, where to now, when he realized this Suzanne was walking home—to his home—to their home—and that solved that.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you, too,” she said, turning down the hall, while he slowly walked to the stairs. Apparently she lived on the first floor.

  “Oh, okay, yes, bye,” he blurted.

  “Xerxes, right?” she called, turning around before she made her way. He decided he needed to look at her—who knew, he might never run into her again, he certainly didn’t have to, hell, he didn’t even have to go to the Indian grocer’s, it could be hers, he could give her that, whatever she wanted, they could see other people, why not, oh what am I thinking, what am I not thinking—and finally he
did it: he looked right into her eyes. He felt as if he had been punched—their intensity was lethal, those two complicated bulbs, as bright as they were dark. Breathtaking indeed.

  “Yes, perfect,” he said, absently.

  “Where is it from?” she called as she walked on down the hall, close to disappearing, just like that.

  He wondered what she would think—in this era, in this time, who knew what a Suzanne might make of it—but he said the only truth that was his, his goddamn name after all, his goddamn appellation of his goddamn homeland: “Xerxes is Persian—Iran—Iranian.”

  She was out of his sight—oh, how he would have wanted to see those eyes then—but he heard her bags come to the floor and a jingling of keys, and her oddly calm though slightly delighted last few words, “How funny—I’m part Persian!”

  He bit his lip so as to trap some undoubted mad yelp that he feared might jump out. He put his groceries down for a second. Was this Suzanne kidding? How could she just say that? Was it true? She looked the part, that was possible—she was, like all Persians, what an average New Yorker could dismiss as Jewish, Italian, Greek, Hispanic, pan-Mediterranean—but just like that? Didn’t she see the importance of that connection, if it even be just a part of her that could offer connection?

  “Really?” he called out … at the same moment her door slammed shut.

  Everything is always too late, he thought. But that girl, maybe she made it too late on purpose. He went upstairs a bit spellbound, still thinking to himself about the importance of their connection, their part-connection. He let her name play on repeat through his mind: Suzanne Suzanne Suzanne. … The name had its part-Farsi aspect. There was the Farsi Soo-san, more commonly associated with Susan. But the presence of the “z” added an interesting dimension—a dimension he didn’t at all want to assume fit this girl whom he didn’t even know—a rather sinister dimension even: soo-zan, to stick to the phonetic, translated exactly to the Farsi word for needle. It was a name for needles. He didn’t know what to make of it—Let’s just leave it at … it could go either way, he told himself. Nonetheless it didn’t really matter, he told himself, because he didn’t really expect to see her again, or so he told himself.