Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  They lay there that night locked in the pitch-black confines of unacknowledgeable mistakes.

  They said little else in the days to come. Suzanne watched the calendar inch through February, that sickly, slight month—soon it would be March. Sure, they could move the date around, but … what if they didn’t have to? She began to comfort herself by indulging in the insulation of pure delusion, dreaming of pomegranate vendors and swimming in the Caspian Sea and faint reliefs on mountains of bearded and headdressed kings, soothed almost fully by blinding herself to the fact that the only relationship she had ever thought might have some permanence—for no particularly good reason, but a feeling—could be in danger. But any day now, he will come around, was how she got through those moments when reality would, crassly, momentarily, stab through.

  When it occurred to her that it had been weeks since he had looked her in the eye, weeks since they had touched each other or done more than mumble, pass things at the dinner table, go to bed, et cetera, she consoled herself by thinking of the certainly many ways to fix it. She eventually came up with an idea. You know, about the trip—and I promise I won’t bring it up again, but I had an idea. I mean it was a present to you, so …you don’t have to take me. You could still go and the second ticket can be anyone. Or you could go alone and ditch it. Or you could take … I don’t know. Your mother. Your …father. She bit her lip on that one. He was bound to take it badly. But she wished he could see she was turning to him with sacrifice. Admittedly, she didn’t know how deeply she meant it, only how deeply she ought to—and she imagined secretly flying there anyway, avoiding him or spying on him, having her own trip while he had his, if it would come to that. Or not, she quickly thought to herself, reality again bursting another bubble. She could just let it all go. Part of her wished it had never happened, the birthday surprise, that idea that had given her stomachaches all along—part of her had known it would go like this. The big bang, indeed. She wished she could close her eyes and have it be September, closer to September at least, when they had become so close as the world fell apart. And here she had tried to sew the world up, to bring the world together with them in it, and here they were, falling apart.

  But she did not expect his calm collected reply or his hand on her knee carefully, shaking a bit, placed there with the greatest of hesitation—as if to say, Look, I care about you, but don’t take this too much to heart—and she definitely did not expect his eyes to meet hers. And she didn’t expect him to come out with it, say something that she hoped was said in kindness rather than condescension—rather than his intent to pull himself out of the equation, rather than his wanting to say once and for all: I lost him, I lost you, I’ve lost everything, I was born lost.

  After all, Xerxes Adam opened his mouth wanting to make one thing clear: that he knew he was disappearing. That to think he ever possessed appearance was probably a joke anyway.

  He said, “Suzanne, I have an idea. Why don’t you go? Why don’t you go, Suzanne, and in fact take him? Take my father, Suzanne.”

  She had sat there stunned at these first words, telling herself, no, it was out of kindness, he really wanted her to go and be happy, with his father, whom he actually loved. No, this was not the desert island to banish all the difficult ex–loved ones—he was saying it because he meant well. No, he was not repeating her name that way to be cruel, to hold some ugly mirror to her, to their difference, their ugly alienating individualities. This was … his …apology, she told herself.

  Xerxes laughed, that violent bitter laugh she’d heard from weathered crazy homeless men, when he opened his mouth again to add, “You know, Suzanne, funny you would bring him up anyway. A little while ago he wrote to me. Did I tell you that? I didn’t tell you that. He wrote me and I didn’t write him back, didn’t even consider writing him back. But in that letter, one of the few things I remember, Suzanne, was him saying he was thinking about Iran. He said he wanted to go.”

  She didn’t know what to do but nod. She didn’t even know if he was lying. So his father had reached out and he had left it alone. She couldn’t even feel surprised. There they were, one by one, all the old loved ones who had been so close to him, who for some reason he felt had wronged him, with their Irans, with their simple wish to for a second take him back, even if it meant just a brief walk, a brief recollection, a week’s visit, through, sure, what might be a little bit of a hell—but so what, it was theirs, his hell, his father’s hell, and in some way, partially hers, too, at least it could be hers … there they were, the cast of characters that Xerxes Adam was one by one banishing from his brain and now ingeniously clumping together.

  They could have each other, Suzanne imagined he was thinking.

  They deserve each other, Xerxes Adam was thinking.

  “So go. Go. Meet him, Suzanne. You don’t need me to educate you. Go, see for yourselves. See what’s happened. See what they make of you, Suzanne. See what he makes of you. See all the hell. See what it was worth.” He paused, and with a grin so despicable, so cynical, so hateful on his face that for a second she wanted to slap him with a final, Suzanne exit: fuck off—which of course she couldn’t do—he added, “Go to the homeland.”

  Part Eight

  Arrivals

  It was over. Fitting, he thought, that their end would come as the Persian New Year was around the corner, his supposed home faintly trying to ring in renewal in this other land where the day was only a day that coincided with the commencement of spring. For many, the vernal clean sweep, amputating winter’s last leg, ushered in notions of a fresh, positive season and possibly era—they were nothing but their prayers, with dread ingrown by then, used to hating even hope—but deep inside Xerxes Adam there remained hurricane and freezing rain and solid cold, a long way from the desired thaw. Over: he had made it over. For almost half a year he had had a girlfriend and it was good. And now—because of his own irreconcilable ignorance, stone-dumb stubbornness, general ineptitude for the simple setting right of seemingly remediable things, and whatever the sum total of this shortcoming of his many shortcomings was—she was lost. Xerxes had become his father. In a parallel universe he would have wanted to actually ask his ther, What was it that made you be like that to your own woman? And child? And what, what exactly would you have done in this situation? So I could do the opposite? What are you like, exactly, so I can work on not being you, please?

  There he was, in a state like a saying his father would screw up: with the dropped ball scared stiff in his court. He was cornered to a new impotence by the stifling silence of his only woman, his unhappy woman who was insisting on being his, still hovering under his wing, but fading fast. They weren’t talking. In fact, he would sometimes spend eight hours at the public library hoping she’d assume it was some freelance job—he was armed with shameless lies, should she ask, which she never even did anymore. She spent more time in her own apartment downstairs and only came over for pretended responsibilities, things she needed, things that had to be checked up on, things. The few times she slept over, for whatever reason giving it a try, they would lie like two matches in a box, dead stiff, no chance of overlap. She would sleep the weekends away, slipping sleeping pills under her tongue if she woke up early enough to get anything done. He would spend much of his off days pacing through the apartment until he eventually thought of something, anything, to do outside. Sometimes he saw it was getting to her too—he’d go the bathroom and she’d suddenly be gone, off to take one of those long aimless sad walks that his mother used to take, he’d imagine. Meanwhile she’d leave him notes, include his laundry with hers, pay for his phone bill, his gas, his electric, all the usual. She’d still sign her name on little notes with a shaky Love, Su and sometimes her trademark “,” but when it came to voice, eyes, a hand, she couldn’t offer those. She knew he didn’t want that anyway and was doing her best to steer clear on tiptoes. She was essentially—and this made him mad, too—waiting for him to get over it, whether that meant making up or breaking up.
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br />   What if I never get over it, Suzanne?

  And yet there was the side of him that knew this was too much—especially when he couldn’t figure out what his real problem was. He tried to separate the issues into lists in his head: lists of what simply irked him, what made it so impossible for him to turn to her and suddenly say, as he had rehearsed countless times over the last few weeks, Baby, I’m so sorry and you’re so sorry so let’s move on with our sorry selves, lists of what it was that made that so tough to chew, and further what it was that was making him erase entire humans from his ever-dwindling network. …

  He boiled it down somewhat:

  A) She had betrayed him.

  B) She had betrayed him by going somewhere that it had always been clear she was not allowed to go.

  C) She had betrayed him by essentially giving him a gift that was sending him back to his blood country, which she knew, had to know, had ruined his life, both by birth and by escape. She had mixed the worlds.

  D) Not to mention that she had taken on this patroness role, making decisions for him, bringing in gifts with such gargantuan price tags and monumental significance that he was starting to get a dangerously shrunken head in her big hands.

  E) Plus, she had not understood why it was inappropriate and almost unforgivable.

  F) Therefore, she had made him slap her.

  G) Which was further problematized by the fact that he had not slapped just any woman—bad enough—no, he had slapped a woman he … loved.

  They had been saying their I Love You’s for quite some time, Xerxes realized. In fact, he remembered the first time it came up: a night when they had been asleep in a snug sweaty spoon, as peaceful as possible, her grinding her teeth a little less, him tossing and turning at a below-average rate, when suddenly a loud boom had woken them both up. Oh my God, the gas mask! she had automatically cried as she jerked herself into consciousness. He had gripped her arm, like a child with nothing to say but only able to gesture for protection. It had been a frightening sound, a sound they immediately assumed was the end of the world knocking, the one they had been living waiting for, it seemed. They got dressed quickly. She grabbed the mask and began to whimper, when suddenly it occurred to him to freeze the moment and say, Wait—should that instant be one of their last. He held her close to him, feeling her newborn-baby-bird tremors melt into his torso. She felt so small, so destructible. He had held her in a way that made him feel like a shell for her; he turned to the skies and said, If you’re going to come down, come now, on me, while I have her within me. And she, she must have sensed this poignant gesture, for suddenly after another whimper she craned her neck to his ear and in that startlingly sexy sweet way of shaken female lovers said, for the first time, Xerxes, I love you, you know? He had nodded, choked up, and in that moment felt it was out of place to even question whether or not he should say it back—he just had to, and so he said it with all the depth the situation—more than he himself—could muster. Yes, Suzanne, I know, I love you, too. And then they had gone outside and seen that it was nothing—a huge garbage truck had rammed into an old brick wall of an abandoned alley—sure, it had made a mess, caused a scene, a minor catastrophe, but it wasn’t it. Not yet. They went back inside, feeling slightly silly, and as they tried to go back to their sleep worlds, she sprang it on him again, as if it were the moral of the story still, no matter what, no matter peace or hell, it was there all along: Still, I love you, Xerxes. He had pretended to be asleep, feeling swallowed by sentiment’s sheer size and shape—suddenly he, the mollusk in her shell—but soon enough he was finding himself saying it over and over like a trusty robot whose programming nobody need question.

  She was always somehow trapping him into something—you could look at it that way, he realized. Her kindness, her love—it always had a forced aspect. He couldn’t say no to her. She knew his nature was thinner than the tough he presented. He would always give in to her. She preyed on that. She was, in her own unseeming way, manipulative. And she had killed with kindness. She might as well have blindfolded him, popped him in a cab, put him on a plane, and taken the blindfold off only once they were in Tehran Airport—or whatever the hell they call it, Xerxes thought, annoyed.

  He tried not to think about the actual problem that went beyond her line-crossing, that lurked behind his reaction—the slap, my God, the slap. She had given him the gift of Iran and nothing could possibly threaten him more—and why, what was up with that, Xerxes? he thought to himself. It was a question that he never tired of. What went on in his head that made his worlds, America and Iran, with their expansive oceanic and ideological gaps, so fucking threatening when considered—even worse, when bridged—in a sentence.

  He tried to boil it down:

  A) It was not only not his home—it was, in fact, his anti-home, if such a thing could be said to exist.

  B) Iran was the only Islamic fundamentalist regime in the world. There were stories—his father’s and mother’s plus a trickle of anonymous gossip—of women getting mutilated for just having their hair exposed. No one was safe in a world like that. And who knew what his last name meant to the Iranian government, what sort of tabs the government had kept on his family and their fleeing. It was a dangerous place, not at all a vacation spot. We’re feeling near death on this turf, so let’s go to Iran? It was like deciding to honeymoon in Hades.

  C) Didn’t somebody—somebody wise, maybe Asian, somebody valid at the very least—once say a man must go to his own world on his own time when he is ready or something like that? No? Wasn’t that just as good a proverb as any?

  D) His father had suggested it in his letter; the root of it all could be traced to exactly that wrong person. Him, Suzanne, all these characters pointing east, plus a whole chorus of average New Yorkers warning that the city was uninhabitable—it suddenly felt like a conspiracy of the cosmos. They were making him go, these supposed do-gooders, telling him that it was his home, but essentially deporting him.

  E) She had made it happen. Who was she? Who did she think she was? He couldn’t go with his own family and so he was expected to go with this woman that he had known for about half a year? This suddenly-she of his? It didn’t make sense.

  F) It was just not his home, less than New York or Eden Gardens was. He did not miss it. It existed only in his barely born first vision of the bad pink light of anti-aircraft missiles, the news, their fights. Not only was it not his home, but it was the birthplace of his nightmares.

  But ethnicity wanted to duel with nationality and often would win—it was hard to escape his birthplace even stateside. Sure, the Middle East had come to America, had chased Americans down and made its own private hells America’s business, but suddenly it felt as if Iran especially was entering the scene. On the news one night, it began: the American government was planning to probe Iran’s possibly full-bodied nuclear weapons plan. It was a beginning, Xerxes thought, The Americans were only beginning to bring his Middle East to their turf. It was the beginning of yet another end.

  Suddenly a famous comedian decided to have an Iranian handy-man on her show. He was going to be a regular cameo of pure slapstick comic relief, a lovable fat heavily-accented presence that would show Americans that Iranians were kind, cuddly, fun … fat handy-men. Xerxes felt furious. He could imagine so did Darius. This man resembled none of them. But just his existence meant that suddenly Iranians were having to color themselves clownish and soft and obese, harmless neighbors, grateful shit jobbers, easy laugh track hacks. There were suddenly defenses and safeguards.

  Iranian-American journalists began writing about the merits of Shiite Islam. As if to say, We are them, but a little different. You are right, we are what you fear, but a little off. We’re more okay. There were suddenly overexplanations and misinformation.

  The director of a dog-sitting company, one of Xerxes’s potential employers, called Xerxes back, pronounced his name perfectly, and then asked, “Don’t take my asking this the wrong way, but is that a Muslim name?”
There were suddenly questions and entitlements.

  Everyone seemed to be whispering, Iran could be next. Suddenly it was Iranians’ season. Their kingdom was poised to come. Iran was everywhere.

  It was all getting so deeply under his skin that he began to think he could give up. Give it all up. Say: Yes, Suzanne. Turn himself in. He imagined himself in the hands of prison guards being led to some infernal Tehran jail full of journalists and writers and artists and some Westerners and some plain old nothing guys like him, and himself declaring simply, Iran, here I am; finally you got me.

  Among the many notes that Suzanne wrote her supposed boyfriend—little Post-its that just put him in the know, like Gone out for a walk, Love Su , or Grocery shopping, need anything? Love Su , to let him know that, sure, she noticed things were off, that they were reduced to this, but there were ways, there was rescue, she was still there, at any minute she could be turned on again—among those were the few that she never ended up leaving, that she immediately crumpled and tossed out in the city’s trash cans, lest he stumble on them in his apartment. They were ones that were flooded with vague, needless, selfless apologies—Please, Xerxes, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it the way you took it, you must know that, or Please, Xerxes, please, we worked so hard, or, Please, Xerxes, you were supposed to be meant to be, didn’t you feel that—that she knew would only annoy him all the worse. The only thing she could do was wait and hope he would come around. It would have to be his move.

  But in the meantime, she could feel her spirits weakening so much that they were taking their toll on her physical self. She grew thinner and thinner, more tired, more restless, more sleepy, more sleep-disturbed. In the mirror she now saw the weary eyes and permanently creased forehead and tense jaw that all together perfectly created the frantic lost look of wasting women.

  She rediscovered living in her old apartment. It was bearable but she was lost on how to fully exist as herself without him. She replayed their first meeting on the rooftop on that epochal evening over and over again. You could not throw away a thing like that, she told herself. If you did, you might as well pretend, say, 9/11 never happened.