Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  There had been a plan and it had fallen through thanks to both of them. The plan: Darius would get himself to the airport by noon at the latest, after first driving her to LAX (they would wake up at 6 a.m. and get her there by 8 a.m.) and then going home, packing, returning to LAX for his own flight. The assumption was that Darius would be awake at 6 a.m. anyway, as he usually was.

  Lala had opened her eyes at 6 a.m., without an alarm going off, even though she hadn’t fallen asleep until 4 a.m. She had turned to him—his eyes were closed. She wasn’t entirely shocked because at 4 a.m., right before she had fallen under, she had glanced over and there he had been, awake, glazed eyes transfixed on the ceiling. It made sense that two hours later, the eyes would give up and be gone. So it’s 6 a.m.—he knew, if he wants to be up, he’ll get up himself, if not…She did not wake him. She tiptoed to double-check her bags, all tidily packed and done.

  He, on the other hand, had left all his packing to do that morning. You’re going on an international flight, spending a full week in our old third world country—don’t you think what you take is pretty important? You haven’t flown in years—since the Revolution, God, since Iran—you think you’ll be so quick to get it all together? In his head he had answered, Oh, you’ll be mailing much of my possessions to me anyway, woman. If this is it, if this is separation, if there is that chance that I am there to stay, then so be it! How does a man pack for that? I have to begin everything again—what’s a few new shelves and shirts?

  But she knew that in spite of the lax preparations, Darius Adam had to be nervous. He had clearly been up worrying all night, because after she said good night to him at around midnight—and he said good night back, and they embraced a little more than luke-warmly for a minute, kissing each other’s face with the soft defeated restraint of sick patients handling other sick patients—and pretended to sleep for the next four hours, she had periodically peeked through the corner of her eyes at his very awake face. His eyes were as open as a dead man’s: unblinking, unexploring, owned by some compelling phantom point in the heavens. He was beyond pretending.

  So that morning, as she tiptoed around him, she realized it was actually a relief not to deal with him and his end of the anxiety. She put on the nice dress she had chosen days before, applied a little makeup, and called a cab, without even a last look at him.

  She focused on the image of her brother instead—gaining her brother, her blood, the person most like her in the world—and tried to have that shadow fall over the face of the sleeping Darius in her head. It got her and her bags out the door.

  What she didn’t know was that by the time the front door uttered its understated slam, Darius was already sitting up and watching her out the window. He had been awake and pretending to sleep. When she rose so sneakily, he thought, Best this way. Best this way when you don’t know what sort of parting a thing is.

  On the other hand, he hated that thought and its reek of finality. He told his head to tell his heart it would have to do everything in its power to not let their world turn upside down. At least not so fast, not like this. Certainly no good-bye meant no real parting.

  He watched her through the blinds, struggling with her luggage, acting so surprised when the cabdriver helped her with her bags. He could see her overthanking him, but she’d probably forget to tip. He was glad she had left first—it made more sense, her leaving him. It was how he preferred it. His leaving would have to mean something else altogether—better the easy go first, better it look as if he had no choice, better he seem motivated by illusions of abandonment. He watched her face in the backseat turn to their window. She was smiling. She looked small and excited like a child, a girl far littler than when he had met her. She would have to be okay. The cab stalled for a second and he wondered if she could see him. Probably not. Let her imagine me the way that’s best for her. Sleeping, peaceful, at rest, always there, always the ground beneath them—any other way would have to be her call.

  They had been through everything, it felt, and he had always envisioned more.

  He tried to promise himself that no matter what there would ultimately be nowhere to go but back—back here, back to her—but it was the word promise that got in the way.

  Of all things to do the morning of his return to Iran, nothing could have been wronger to Xerxes than to be sitting patiently, at 8:30 a.m., in the frosty fluorescent-lit reception area of Dr. Reginald Arnold’s midtown office.

  “Have you seen Dr. Arnold before?!” the receptionist chirped the minute he stepped in.

  “No,” Xerxes shook his head, smiling phonily, sweating badly, making both nervousness and illness equally unknowable.

  “Referral?!”

  “No. Well, yes. Maybe.” He told her who his girlfriend was and prayed that this was all that was necessary.

  “Oh, Suzanne…Al’s daughter!” the receptionist laughed. “Oh, wonderful! Wow, haven’t seen them in a minute. How lucky you are!”

  Xerxes nodded hesitantly. The receptionist had him fill out some forms and told him the wait wouldn’t be long.

  Forty-five minutes later, as he thumbed through the latest National Geographic in a cold sweat—Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, all featured, page after page, all of his somewhat-people and their dark faces and dead eyes and veils and wraps and tunics and inhospitable landscapes and dying animals and ruin after ruin—he finally got called in.

  The nurse put him into a neat white room, took his temperature—“totally normal”—his blood pressure—“absolutely normal”—and left him, not without saying, “I hear you’re a friend of Al’s. Do say ‘hi’ to him! We miss him! It’s been a while … how is he?”

  “I assume very healthy,” Xerxes said through clenched teeth, “if it’s been such a while.”

  The nurse laughed hysterically, as if he had made the best joke ever, and left him there, where he waited another long—but slightly shorter—while until finally the door opened and a towering white old ghost of a man in a doctor’s coat appeared before him.

  “Reginald Arnold,” he said as he extended his pale nearly translucent hand. “You are … er, Excor-sis Adams. Did I butcher that? Oh, friend of Al’s, I see?”

  “Zerk-zees Adam—boyfriend of his daughter’s,” he quickly corrected. He had never seen such a white, white man. He looked like an apparition. Like an old painting of a dead president, supernaturally, awfully, American. “Doctor, I’m actually in a bit of a hurry, you see. I’m going abroad this afternoon. …”

  “Is that right?” He scribbled something into his notepad.

  “Yes. Very far. Asia.” Xerxes had thought about it beforehand and decided that Asia had just the neutrality that could slip past controversy. “I just want to make sure I’m okay.” He told him the symptoms and the doctor nodded at everything. He checked his ears, throat, chest.

  “Well, Mr. Adams, I’m not sure why you’re here!” he said. Big smile, brown teeth.

  Neither am I, Xerxes thought to himself, neither am I. “It’s Adam. But, well, we just wanted to make one hundred percent sure, with this trip and all. I feel … fine. Or close. Or a little bad. But then, I always do—feel bad, I mean.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t always feel bad. We’ll schedule another appointment and see how you’re doing nutrition-wise, run some blood tests—I see you haven’t had a physical in years. But, as for today, right now. …” He smiled and shrugged and scribbled something on the notepad again.

  “Nothing is off at all?”

  Dr. Arnold looked up, still vaguely amused. “Tell me, what exactly do you feel is wrong with you? What feels off?”

  It felt like a test. Xerxes tried to explain his symptoms, but every time he mentioned one, it sounded like an exaggeration or a justification for his presence there.

  “Well. Have you been stressed lately?”

  Xerxes thought about it. Of course. He hadn’t been as aware of it—he had been so intent on living drama-free, going with the flow of life, of Suzanne, her plans, this
dream, getting it over with—but clearly he had to have been. He told the doctor he was, although he always was.

  “Hmm. Okay, well, trips can make one nervous, too. And Asia, you say! My! Japan?” he grinned widely, for no reason Xerxes could think of.

  The spook had outsmarted him. Enter controversy. Xerxes slowly shook his head. “Well, actually, no. Less East. Middle, really. The … Middle …East.”

  “Oh, wow! Israel …?” said the grin, resolute and, Xerxes thought, rude.

  Xerxes shook his head, feeling near faint. He wished the doctor had taken his blood pressure at this point. “No, not quite.” There was no way to gloss it over. He didn’t want to get into it at all, but he wanted it over with. “Not at all, really.” He paused and with closed eyes blurted it out: “Iran!”

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that the doctor was all raised eyebrows, with a big grin to end all big grins. “Whoa! Okay! That’s a first.” He scribbled several things furiously on his pad again.

  “I’ve never been,” Xerxes lied, thinking birth after all wasn’t such a lie. “My parents are from there.”

  The doctor nodded, still deep in the world of his pad and pen. He had suddenly grown quiet, busily writing more and more. Without looking up, he muttered, “Anything more I can help you with today, Mr. Adams?”

  Xerxes thought about it. “Well, no. But according to you—everything, sinuses, et cetera—all okay?”

  Dr. Arnold, still without eye contact, began to move himself and his all-engrossing pad over to the door. It was over. “Mr. Adams, everything seems perfectly fine to me. Have a fine trip. We’ll check on you further, soon, I do hope!”

  His “hope” had a bad ring to it.

  “I hope so,” Xerxes added, pissed that he’d repeated the h-word. As the doctor began to walk out, Xerxes asked, just in case, just once more, “So nothing wrong with me at all, huh?”

  The doctor popped his ghostly head through the barely opened door. “Nothing that I can see, Mr. Adams!” The doctor again put too much work into his grin, looking more than ever like some strange colonial specter, a weird ghost of a man whose ill-illuminated presence suddenly seemed to Xerxes to indicate something more, a significance that he was too sick to read, an omen that his disease-struck spirit was too battered to translate. …

  “Well, good, thanks!” The door closed, and Xerxes shook his head roughly, as if to shake off all stupid thoughts, and got moving. On his way out he discreetly waved to the receptionist, who cried back, “Bye, and promise to send our regards to Al and the family, okay?!”

  Once in the midtown sunshine he felt exhausted. He considered the nearby subway stop but instead, feeling drained and surely even sicker than before, he decided it was best to hail a cab. The suddenly-summer sun seemed to be draining him of any will. It felt as if a full day’s emotional energy had been spent, and the day was just about to begin. Asia, after all, was still ahead of him.

  The duration of the cab ride also felt too much to be true. When the cab pulled over at his block, Xerxes decided to tip better than he had ever tipped in his entire life, and like some kind of new, overly gentlemanly, but clearly God-fearing man, instead of his usual Bye, thanks he commanded the cab driver to take care of himself.

  Just as he stepped out of the cab a homeless man, cradling an empty bottle, rammed drunkenly into him. Watch it, Xerxes snapped, appalled at drunkenness like that at 11 a.m. However, at his apartment door, inches away from his girlfriend and the world of final trip preparations, he paused. Omens, he thought. He had to learn to read whatever he could. He rewound himself back to the corner and thought, what would it hurt, there was some time, he was healthy, it would make him feel healthier at least, make him more bearable, with all the stress, the stress that after all could lead to illness should it not be attended to, why not? …He ducked into that same corner bar—the one he hadn’t sat slumped in, hadn’t so shamefully sought, hadn’t ordered Scotch on the rocks after Scotch on the rocks, hadn’t found himself hiding in just like that, no, not since his father had visited well over a year before.

  Just before noon, Darius Adam was spotted sitting on a large piece of luggage outside of Eden Gardens, waiting for something, apparently.

  Marvin, even though he had never seen him before and mostly forgotten he existed, immediately knew it was him. The man had that foreign look and it wasn’t Mexican or Indian or anything like that. He looked Middle Eastern and a bit disturbed, the way he had always imagined Lala’s husband looking.

  Marvin had been on his way home from a sleepover at Gigi’s—a late night of drinking that had ended up with him far too incapacitated to drive. He was heading over to his SUV parked on the Arcadia curb, when he identified the man and thought, What the hell—he couldn’t help wanting to do it, now that it was finally upon him.

  With Lala out of their lives, what was so wrong with him having a casual word with just another grown man in the universe?

  “Hello there,” Marvin called, adding a big smile and a wave.

  Darius Adam forced a tight smile and a nod, and that was that.

  Marvin, hungover and therefore feeling a bit fuck-it, decided to really press the what-the-hell ishness in him that day. He went over and extended his hand. “Marvin Dill,” he said. “I think I … know you, so to speak?”

  Darius Adam took his hand reluctantly, adding a firm shake of his head. Fine, hello, it said, reluctantly, but Enough, it also said.

  “I know your wife, I mean,” Marvin clarified. “Not well or anything. We met. Through a woman named Gigi in the building. Your wife … Lala Adam?”

  Darius Adam nodded slowly, looking more curious as well as more pissed.

  “She’s a nice lady,” Marvin said awkwardly. “Haven’t seen her around for a while.”

  Darius Adam continued to nod. He had to say something. “She’s been here. Until today. Now she’s … gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean?” Marvin, of course, couldn’t help equating gone with dead. For a second, his body stiffened in alarm.

  “My wife went to New York,” he said, still tight-lipped, as if only giving in to him in hopes of his giving up.

  “Where your son lives, right?” Marvin was relieved she wasn’t goner-gone, but had to throw that in for Gigi’s sake. The whole New York thing had always seemed a bit bogus, so here was their chance.

  “He’s not there,” Darius said, and just as Marvin was about to think aha! Darius clarified, “He lives there, but she’s not seeing him.”

  Marvin nodded. Odd egg, that Lala, and obviously married to another odd egg, this Darius, who seemed fiercely antisocial in nature, and yet here he was, almost accommodating with info, spilling most beans. Sure, he was a bit gruff, but he had the gruffness of a man pissed about having nothing much to conceal. “So why is she there? She didn’t move?”

  Darius almost shrugged. “A visit, I guess. Her brother. She is going to see him, she thinks.”

  Marvin froze. No, he thought. Hot damn, it couldn’t be…“Her brother? The one?”

  Darius nodded, looking even more suspicious. “So you knew about that. Good friend, I guess? Yes, she thinks she found him.”

  Marvin nodded. “He found her? The one who was lost, since they were …”

  Darius Adam nodded. “You know a lot. You met my wife a few times?”

  “A few.” Marvin paused. “He actually, really, finally did write to her, huh?”

  Darius Adam nodded again, looking close to exasperated.

  He couldn’t begin to pursue this properly. He dropped it, his whole body nonetheless shaking a bit in shock. Slowly, he asked, “So are you going to New York, too, then?”

  Darius laughed. “Oh no! Never again, I hope. I didn’t like … well, I had a tough time there once. Anyway, I am going to … Iran.”

  Marvin wondered if Darius was fucking with him. He had never heard Lala mention either of them wanting to go.

  “Going home, eh?” he tried to say it in a friendly way that he feare
d sounded creepy and mocking. He didn’t want to alienate Darius—who seemed okay after all. He should have known that crazy Lala bad-mouthing him all the time meant that he was actually an okay guy at least.

  Darius Adam didn’t interpret it condescendingly. He gave a small shrug again, then smiled. “Back home … for good!”

  “For good?” Marvin exclaimed.

  Darius Adam’s black eyes looked as if they were winking in the deep sunshine. “No, no. … I said, ‘so good!’”

  Marvin nodded. He had so many questions to ask, about Lala, about her brother, but he didn’t know how he could ask them. He decided when Lala was back he would go and see her. He would sneak away from Gigi, never tell her even, and corner Lala for a chat. Maybe just a last chat—Lala couldn’t hate him so much that she wouldn’t dish the end of that saga, the happy ending that she had to know she at least mostly owed to him.

  When Darius’s car service arrived several silent minutes later, Marvin immediately went to help him stuff his luggage in the trunk.

  “Thanks,” Darius said, “but the cabdriver could have done that.”

  Marvin shrugged. “Just have a great trip. Maybe see you soon!”

  “I don’t know—maybe!” Darius said, with a rough laugh. As he got into the cab, he rolled down the window, and with a savagery that seemed intentionally comic or a comic tag that had an intentional savagery, with a definite wink, a wink or maybe a squint, but a smile, possibly a grimace, more than a smile—Who ever knew with that crazy family?—Darius yelled, “and stay away from my no-matter-what-still-wife please!”