Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  She did not understand a world where people didn’t come around, where people didn’t grow sick of holding grudges, where the humanity inside humans wouldn’t melt away their stubborn hold on old principles. It was inevitable that people had to go back to where they belonged, right? Return to those who had claims on a piece of their heart, right?

  She could not live with the idea that he would be the exception to her rules.

  She imagined speaking to and confiding in his mother on the phone—because she couldn’t even let herself imagine his father, so taboo had that become—and Mrs. Adam saying, Oh, don’t mind him, they’re the same, exactly the same, father and son—which is to say semi-hopeless. There is no point in waiting. Ultimately it will end if you don’t find your own out first. Move on, go on. Get a life. Suzanne imagined retorting back, You don’t understand and maybe you shouldn’t. But suddenly without him, I’m nowhere.

  It was going to be the 1381st Persian New Year and Lala thought that would provide the ideal miracle setting for their meeting: that just after arrival, just a bit after the cab ride to her hotel, just upon her first walk through that city’s streets … there he would be. Bobak. Their New Year’s present to each other. He would maybe be difficult for a moment, say, Laleh, but don’t you get it? I didn’t ask to be found. And she would hold him, and say in Farsi, Oh, older brother of mine, that’s just the hurt, the pain, that made it so hard—look, look what you’ve gained—look what your little sister has become—here comes the oldest new thing the world could have ever given us: us! He would eventually come around, like all difficult men, and finally laugh, Welcome to New York, little sister! And there would be no talk of hospitals, no old family tragedy, nothing but the future and joy. Later that week they would find Xerxes—she’d show up at his door with her brother, hand in hand, and as her son opened the door she would announce, Look, look what your mother has dug up: an uncle for you! Lala imagined the two men shaking hands in shock. They would be nearly identical. It would explain how Lala would recognize him in the first place—her brother would be a Xerxes in the pure, a Xerxes without the Adam, a Xerxes who possessed a past that was entirely hers.

  Oh, yes, there will be tears, she thought, but she couldn’t wait for them.

  Darius, meanwhile, was appalled.

  “It’s already bad enough—I mean tough enough—and now you want to tell me it’s a coincidence that you’re going to be gone on Norouz?” Darius snapped. “Our first New Year apart in almost thirty years! This seems right to you?”

  “It’s not my choice—that’s the start of the school’s spring break,” Lala insisted, “and I need a whole week. I am supposed to put off a single precious day of might I remind you very hard search work, so that we can get dressed up in front of the TV, eat some candy, count down by ourselves to Iranian radio? It’s not like I am taking that day away. I’ll call. Plus you’ll be driving me to the airport that morning—we’ll be together, since suddenly our damn togetherness is an issue to you.”

  “It has always been,” Darius insisted, “and what’s the point of that morning? The New Year will chime in the evening. We’ll count down on the phone?”

  “If my plane has even landed at that point, Darius,” she said firmly. “The point is, we have to learn to live this way sometime, Darius. We won’t be tied to each other forever, you know.”

  It silenced everything. Darius did not—although neither did Lala completely—know what she meant by that. Lala, who got a kick out of hazing her statements to a perfect nebula with manufactured crypticism, hoped that he might mellow out, interpret the reference to separation as a reference to their old age. In death, they would be done after all. But Darius, with his feet always resolutely on the ground, suspected it meant the divorce that he feared in his bones—that she would be off there rediscovering her old past suddenly, in the soil of a new slice of this new country, perhaps never to return or perhaps to pick up an even greater wanderlust that would take her farther, and he, he would be left to start a new life, or even a version of his old life, in that old land of his past. Their past. It was possible that they were over.

  “I can’t tell you not to go, woman,” he grumbled. “So go, you get lost, too.”

  “Nobody’s getting lost, Darius. It’s the season for things to get found,” she insisted. “It takes some work, you know. You have to put in some work.”

  Sure, if by work you meant magic, he thought. It took doing impossible irrational things that equaled hope, the frail pathetic human impulse that she was suddenly bound to. It took picking up a phone, dealing with his son’s hanging up, maybe another unanswered letter, and then a flight of his own, and a walk he’d remember up and down East Village streets, to his door—a knock, a pause, an opening, and words that would kill for both of them, Son, let me back in. I have come to make it better. Forgive—ending with that hardest word of all. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But like his wife he would adopt that most desperate, urgent kind of trying, that shot in the dark, that myth of the somehow-sometimes-hit bull’s-eye, whose very real life existence, although only once in a blue moon, made for the invention of the word miracle. He had to believe in miracles.

  “Plus, I’ll only be gone a week,” she kept reminding him.

  But that was enough, he thought, enough of a window for him to need to get out. They hadn’t all melted away like this from him before—he was Darius Adam, once at the helm of that household of three in Eden Gardens. Everyone had needed him. Even other people’s cats, even all those nobodies’ birds. And now without his family’s need, with just some piles of bills and a promise to sustain them somehow in their place, what was the point? He had felt the itch to go home months ago, if not years ago—even on the eve of horrific protests, the symbolic burning of otherwise happy men, the constant scraps of distant relatives’ bad news, the somber images on the TV, all somehow amounting to more missing—and now, with her impending absence, the itch had a means to be scratched. They were leaving him in their own possibly temporary ways, within the great American landlock anyway, but little did they know he would have in store for them a leaving they could never imagine. Gone: he’d really be gone, a bona fide true goner. Take that for loss, he’d say. How the hell would any miracle dig him up? He would be beyond their finding, if they should even employ that—and he wasn’t sure they would. On top of the feelings of giving up and truly missing his homeland, there was also a gesture of goodwill within it all: his getting lost/going back to where he belonged, maybe it was what was best for them all anyway, they might think.

  He fantasized about arriving in the streets of Tehran on the big day itself, too … amid streamers and firecrackers and animal screams and delirious song—oh, do they do the new year anymore? They had to, even the ayatollahs had to know they had to. Darius could imagine—filled suddenly with an overwhelming dose of that soul-suffocating loneliness—getting there and pretending the celebrations of Persian New Year 1381 on his old city streets were simply his welcome-back party.

  And then one day he had enough. Call it the madness in the air of ever-bipolar March or just another world-sponsored breakdown, or perhaps a natural turning of the tide for a man who simply had nowhere to go but up—but one day, after wallowing for ages in the state of having lost it all, Xerxes Adam was suddenly snapped out of it. He was seized by a thrilling urgency that so welcomingly cut into that sick old air of their stagnation, so suddenly that all he could worry about was that all the newfound goodness equaled dying or something.

  Fuck it. What the hell do I have to live for anywhere?

  In reality, he was manic at most. Depression rust had frozen all yesterday’s systems and here was mania’s flame to morph the present into a possible future.

  Counterintuition flooded him so deeply, so vigorously, that it was as if he had acquired a brand-new blood supply. It was more than an Opposite Day impulse. It was all that was left for a man who had hit rock bottom. Either you could let it all go and lie dead on that bot
tom rock or you could rise from your ashes and make life happen again, no matter how seemingly defeated the steps, no matter how insane and insulting and dreaded.

  They say that only the manic realistically entertain the idea of suicide; the depressed are too depressed to deeply explore it, much less ever carry it out. He was suddenly unafraid of death. Let them kill him in Iran then—let fate do as it would—he would have died sooner or later in his old miserable post-birthday condition. He was at least now alive—if even too alive—for another round!

  The air of acidic wellness had first hit him one morning when he woke feeling choked by something very dead-ended in himself, and just when it seemed serious, as if the demons were real and the options all too possible, something like a pump of death-defying goodwill shot through him and there he was … suddenly his arms wrapped around Suzanne’s neck, maybe a bit too abruptly, for she actually screamed, a light disturbed scream, and then offered him her eyes, worried eyes that saw in his shake-up some sort of unstable newness, a profound new wave of upheaval so clear and so solid that suddenly relief and terror seemed siblings. It was the first time he had touched her since the fight.

  “What’s going on, Xerxes? Are you okay?”

  He softened his clutch and dropped to his knees—collapsed really, but quickly modified the pose to make it look like a poetic chivalric stance—and held her face and began kissing it all over, over and over, as she kept saying, “Oh, Xerxes, oh sweetheart, but what, what do you mean?”

  For a while, he kept saying, “Suzanne, I can’t take it anymore, I just can’t take, can’t take it anymore,” weeping a bit, the type of tearless dry weeping that he’d sometimes feel overcome by, those turbulent entrail-heaving fits of his child-self, when he was smaller than his own grief, when it wasn’t just a matter of hiding it but a matter of controlling it lest it burst outside himself and swallow him up—Oh, how could I explain it to her anyway?—he himself could barely grasp what was happening, a breakdown, maybe that was what it was, maybe he had woken up refreshed like that because in his head were the new juices, the corrosive chemical formula of a breakdown. But if it be, so be it, he told himself, he had been beyond broken for weeks, let this breakdown, this insanity, this end-of-him be the new him, it was at least one last pulse to ride through—Shit, maybe I am dying—but who cared, who had time to analyze it all, when there she had been for weeks, all he had in the world, his old new girl, his only girl, hunched in a corner, counting down days to nothing, just silent and sick and fading—he had actually seen it the day before, really noticed it, how she had walked by just barely there like a hologram, and all he had seen was a skeleton of the old spirit, a faded image, a vintage newspaper clipping of a girl—oh, there was no time! No time for anything but revolutions. He loved her. He had maybe lost it. But there was no losing her, losing time, holding on to his impending self-destruction, imagining himself missing, lying at the bottom of a nowhere-land well, no that doesn’t have to be—oh, he could almost pick up the phone and even call him, if he wasn’t sure he’d just add new wrath to old wrath by shouting, O fuck it all, father, let’s fuck it!—outside in those other worlds they were dying, after all, didn’t they remember, dying of a capital-S Suffering he couldn’t imagine, and so what was he doing, Who the hell gave me that right to give up?…No, he had no choice but to try it, no choice, nothing in the world but to live, live this sweet terrible Life!

  “Can’t take what anymore?” she was asking, “I mean, I know what, I think I know what, but please, Xerxes, tell me what you’re thinking, can you?”

  “I am thinking,” he began and then paused a bit, “I am thinking, my Suzanne, I am thinking that we have to. It is time for a trip. We’re going—and thank you—to Iran.”

  She smiled, embraced him, but didn’t take a word of it seriously. She saw the mention of Iran as just a make-up gesture, just a way to present the old bone of contention and shatter it, so they could move on, go on with that love that she had been sure enough of to hold on to, even as she felt herself falling apart within that love’s dark and dubious architecture. In her mind she had believed in the miracle of this moment and it had come. Hope was a bitch, but when hope comes through, unfathomable the extent it can go, she thought.

  But as their union cemented itself more and more strongly, perhaps more strongly than ever, through the test of hours and then days, he only brought it up more and more—Xerxes made Iran the main factor behind his personal revolution.

  “The point is, it’s all perfect,” he said. “What date do we leave?”

  “March nineteenth,” she said, hesitantly, sure that its being around the corner would put him off that track, sure that whatever charade he was playing would have to wear off and whatever lesson would reveal itself and just let them live on. She added, “So what’s the rush? That’s like in a week and a half, and my agent said if we decide we really want to, it can be changed. Let’s put it off a bit, at least?”

  The truth was that the whole idea made her sick. She had no desire to go anymore—the absence of desire was so real that she questioned if she had ever really wanted to go. What had she been thinking? Of course it was a bad move. She was ready to say Xerxes was right with his punishment—she had crossed a line. The best forgiveness she imagined he could grant her was just letting it all go and starting over.

  But perhaps that was precisely part of her punishment: Xerxes was nowhere near letting it go. It was more than ever, more than it was ever allowed to be, the issue, and he did not even try to hide for a second that it was The Issue that had brought him running back, running madly, ecstatically, horrifically, back to her.

  “March nineteenth? That’s enough time! Ten days! That’s all the time in the world, Suzanne! Let’s do it.”

  She had decided not to talk about it, only nod at most. She hoped that as the day neared he would let go.

  But then one evening as they were cooking together, his phone rang and with it came another world-mixing threat to their newfound harmony. Xerxes had decided to play head chef that night, reading off a pile of Internet recipes, announcing he would be showcasing a new special sauce for their eggplant rigatoni. He could suddenly cook—she couldn’t believe it. He was elbow-deep in the slimy thin blood of tomatoes when the phone rang—“Can you get that?” he asked Suzanne, who was assigned to just chop vegetables. She put down her knife and carrot slivers and, with a quick kiss to his cheek, skipped to the phone.

  As with other miracles of this time period, an old dream had come true: she was speaking to none other than Xerxes Adam’s mother.

  “Who is this?” Mrs. Adam had immediately snapped, her soft accent lessening the blow of the rude introduction, as if she was just confused and foreign and therefore required some extra understanding.

  “Oh, hello, this is Suzanne. … I’m Xerxes’s girlfriend. … I take it this is Mrs. Adam?” she had not realized in time that it might sound creepy to have come right out with her prediction like that. But she couldn’t help it. It was an older foreign female voice with an accent of mixed-up Iranian though resolutely snappy mannerisms—who else? It fit exactly.

  “Oh, oh, you are. …” Mrs. Adam didn’t complete the sentence. She offered a few awkward chuckles. “Oh, hello then. Nice to speak to you.”

  “Oh, yes, same with me, I mean, so happy to finally speak to you,” Suzanne stumbled.

  “Yes,” Lala repeated even more awkwardly. “You stay at his place, I see, yes?” She regretted saying it immediately—Xerxes would hate the way she asked that. She wished she could make her prying more inconspicuous.

  “Oh, yes, sometimes,” Suzanne said. “Well, I live in the building.” There was more silence—she didn’t know what the right answer was. “But yes, we stick together a lot!” And more silence. “Xerxes, he’s in the kitchen, cooking, let me get him—”

  “Oh, cooking? Him? Wow, what an influence you must have. Don’t bother him. I just wanted to know if he got my message.”

  “Message? I’
m not sure—”

  “Yes, yes, I left it on the thing—” she stammered.

  Suzanne paused. Thing equaled … machine?

  “Oh? Well, let me get—Xerxes! Xerxes, phone!” Suzanne called over her shoulder.

  “No, no, don’t bother him,” she insisted. “You must know anyway. … I am coming.”

  “Coming?”

  At that moment Suzanne heard the housewifelike whistling-while-he-worked be put on hold. He walked in wiping his hands with paper towels.

  But Lala was still going on: “Oh, yes, next week, Persian New Year, I get in to New York, he must have—”

  “Oh, I didn’t—oh, well, here he is—” Suzanne signed off as Xerxes immediately grabbed the phone out of her hand.

  She plopped onto the couch like a rag doll. His mother was coming? Next week? Persian New Year? She had no idea. But suddenly she realized it was another layer of icing on the miracle cake—this would certainly push next week’s trip to Iran out of his head, once and for all, no?

  “Hello, Mother,” he said, and while most of the phrases came out in a half-Farsi-half-English hybrid, some others, probably partly for her benefit, came out in crystal-clear English.

  “Yes, yes, she is, yes, she’s very nice, yes. …”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Mother … really? Oh God … no, no … we’ll just be missing each other. …”

  “If you had told me earlier …”

  “Well, Persian New Year, I figured it was coming, but I had forgotten the exact date. …”

  “But it’ll interest you to know that if it’s Persian New Year then we’re going to be doing something perfect!”

  “I know, Mother, I’m sorry. …”