Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  But when she materialized again, it was in a way that was greater than anything he could have dreamed. One evening, behind a firm knock on his door, there she was announcing herself, “Hey, it’s Suzanne!”

  He paused at the door, angry at himself for looking so scrappy when he was alone, resorting to total shittiness in the expectation of absolute loneliness forever. His hair wasn’t brushed, his socks didn’t match, he was wearing a white T-shirt that might as well be an undershirt, and slacks that might as well be sweats. He looked low-budget (he was), a man who never had company (never)—hell, he looked like a kid just living away from his parents for the first time. She would have no choice but to love or leave the real him.

  When he opened the door, he landed on the eyes, and to his horror, they were badly bloodshot.

  “Hi, can I come in?” she said quickly, running a shaking hand over her face.

  He nodded and let her walk in. She immediately went to the center of his living room as if the chairs didn’t exist—as if to punish him for the lack of a sofa, he thought—and collapsed on the ground, with her head buried in her clutched knees. She began a long, thorough, wholehearted spell of sobbing.

  He was terrified. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  She carried on and finally, after a minute or two, looked up, red and puffy in the face, but still truly ethereal somehow, with those big universal-secret-holding eyes barely hidden under the fringe of rugged curls. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s not like me to do this. And I don’t know you.” She paused. Then, as if opting against reserve, her pitch grew higher and she went on and on, “But I was just watching the news—and I don’t know anyone else in this building—or very many people in the city really anymore—and earlier I heard some military planes and that freaked me out—and they had this account of this beautiful pregnant woman, seven months pregnant, whose husband was in the first tower, died in the staircase, they think, and shit, it just hit me, for the first time really—can you believe it—it’s only been a a couple of weeks—it happened—here—my God—I guess that’s all, that it just hit me—and the sound of the planes, these days you’d think they’d know better, instead they get so close—so I don’t know, I got scared—that’s normal, I would think, but then again I don’t know what is normal these days. …”

  He nodded over and over. He didn’t know how far he could go—could he go over and put a hand around her shoulders, give her a friendly neighborly hug (was there such a thing?), tell her it would all be all right (but was that even true?), promise to be there forever (oh, how could I?). … But he had to admit he understood her anxiety wholly—what didn’t make sense? The world had fallen apart and there they were, right in the middle of it.

  He brought her some tissues and she smiled, just barely. “Look, I don’t have anyone either,” he said, proud of having said this, knowing it was the right—not to mention, true—thing. “And I get scared, too.”

  She smiled. A small sob came out and then a laugh, almost all at once. “Xerxes,” she said. “I remembered your name. I had to look you up to know which apartment was yours. ‘X. Adams’ on the mailbox. You’d be the only X, I guess. Although I didn’t expect Adams.”

  “Adam,” he muttered and then laughed dutifully along with her—Oh, his zany name, that kooky X, that shockingly unkooky Adams, correction: under-kooky Adam!—truly grateful that the clouds were clearing and she was able to sit up and talk, and even watch a sitcom he’d never seen before. Ten minutes into it, he realized that he was hungry, that it was past his dinner hour, and while he was ready to put a can of beans in a pot for himself, he couldn’t do that to her.

  “I’m thinking of ordering food,” he immediately decided out loud, suddenly encouraged by the strange authority a needy crying girl could lend an otherwise painfully insecure, indecisive guy.

  “Oh, perfect,” she smiled at him, then hesitated. “You mean together, right?”

  “Yes, together—I order food every night,” he lied automatically, digging through his cupboards for the Chinese place flyer, the Italian place flyer, something, anything. He added a partial lie to soften the pathetic reality of his resourceless existence: “I mean, once in a while.” Then he added a truth, to soften the obviousness of the half lie: “And it would be nice to have dinner with you.”

  It was somewhat nice. Chinese. They ate together well, although growing more silent as the night went on. It was sinking in on them, he thought, the weirdness. He was less in control, he was running out of things to say. She was getting tired and, he worried, sullen all over again.

  “What part of you is Persian then?” he finally blurted, once he ran out of food.

  “Oh,” she smiled. “My dad. My dad is three-quarters.”

  “Three-quarters?” He tried not to sound disappointed. That wasn’t even a whole part of her. It was still something, but what is 75 percent of 50 percent of something?

  “I’m three-eighths. His father was half Persian, half English and his mother was Persian.”

  “Wow,” he tried to effuse. “And your mother is …?”

  “She’s your typical white—Irish, French, Scandinavian, Eastern European, you know.”

  “So you’re almost half Persian,” he stated, as for a record, as if wanting her to withdraw or drop or give in percentagewise.

  She nodded, with a proud grin. “You’re full? Persian, I mean?”

  He nodded back, without elaborating. It had to be obvious, he thought.

  “What does your family think of … all this?” she asked, making a hand gesture that was both an indicator and a dismissal of the cosmos.

  “Well,” he took a deep breath. He thought this was going to be a long story, when he realized there actually wasn’t much to tell. “I’ve only talked to my mother and it’s the usual—worried but thinks it’ll be okay. She’s seen so much bad stuff in her day, so who knows?”

  “Oh,” she nodded. “My mother doesn’t think so much about it, either.” And then she had to ask it, the one thing she was not supposed to ask, damn her: “What does your dad think?”

  It was as if the question alone had sucked the life out of him—suddenly he felt unconquerably exhausted. Suddenly, the novelty of a girl in his den of abysmal loneliness had worn off. Suddenly, he was looking forward to having her leave. He was not up for the real long story with this girl who popped into and out of the thin air of his worlds like a magic trick, an air kiss, a storm cloud. He had no reason to trust in her substance. “My dad and I don’t talk,” he finally murmured, getting up, hoping it would be uncomfortable enough for her to stop her probing.

  And apparently it was. She nodded politely and yawned. He yawned back, as if in approval. He noticed her eyes were getting sleepy, too. It was barely 10 p.m. “Well, getting to that time, huh,” he said clumsily. “Bedtime, huh.”

  She nodded, with a small dreamy smile. A beautiful girl, though, he thought, Suzanne. A beautiful, exhausting girl. He wondered if it was his lack of girls or simply his lack of humans in this girl-filled, human-over-congested city that helped him take her for granted so fast.

  She rose wearily. “Xerrrrrxeeees,” she stretched his name with a yawn in a way that made it sound foreign to him, so long, so arduous, so much more than two syllables, almost burdensome with its freak consonant. She wasn’t moving, in no rush. She was simply gazing back beyond him to where his bedroom lay unannounced. “Would it be okay …?”

  He didn’t want to be presumptuous so he addressed it at a minimum, with a slow lukewarm nod, and she nodded back. And that night—a night when he was truly too tired to register the shock value, the milestone, the novelty—he had a woman in his bed. A real live woman, sleeping, soundly even, immediately, without bringing it up, without any extra movement to imply a further want, a further need—for all he knew that implication didn’t exist … and he lay there, as on any other night quite awake, but this time a bit less tortured, given the task of listening to her breathing the way most h
umans do when they experience the normal healthy erase-all antidote to a day’s burdens, sleep.

  Blame it on the setting, their era, those abnormal circumstances, September 2001, but soon they made a habit of it. This person, this new woman person, she became a regular. They shared several evenings a week. They had meals. She got to know him—him less of her, he felt, but a lot nonetheless. He got used to her in his bed and wondered how he had lived so long without it. And soon his insomnia began to eat at him a little less, because he came to know how bedtime could be used for other things, better things—you could chip at others’ sleep time with something more productive, all the things that happened in a bed other than sleep … and afterward, to watch her fall deep, deep, deep into a thick slumber that he couldn’t even break with a few soft kisses on the neck, atop her hair, a hand over her small satisfied body—no, his nights were better. Suddenly, he felt that everything, including the city and world, all because of her, had a stab at being okay again.

  If there was one thing that Lala knew about life, it was that you couldn’t live like that, not the way her husband was suddenly “living.” It wasn’t even vaguely life, but suddenly it had become him, whatever it was that was eating him, making him the zero of zeroes, molding him into a big lump of the sum total of chronic sleep disturbances. That was the only way Lala could describe it: There we are each night, normal hour, he’s in bed, I’m in bed, “good night” we still even sometimes say, lights off, I’m out, I think he’s out, and then there you go, I’m waking up two hours later from the entire bed shaking from his big stupid body suddenly jolted up. … I go back to sleep but you know, that’s no way to sleep. I don’t know what he does. I don’t want to know what he does, to be truthful. …

  Usually, Darius wouldn’t do much of anything. He would fight sleep, suddenly fall asleep, then wake up—head full of a foreign turmoil that came indeed from some ugly bored department in his own head—and he’d try to convince himself to lie down again—he’d lie down again, still be thinking about it, get close to nodding off, but then the worry that what he was still thinking about was about to coincide with him nodding off (therefore re-creating it again) would seize him and up he’d be yanked again. He could take only so much of Lala’s curses—suddenly sleep to her meant something more profound than ever, as she had really gotten a life this time and it had unfortunately coincided with him losing his.

  Lala Adam had, after all, triumphed over the season of her sudden friendlessness. Soon enough she was bowing out of drinking and watching movies with her two friends, she was skipping walks with Gigi to watch the news, she was cutting conversation short with Marvin to instead converse with her sick husband or her disturbed son. As sober autumn took over, more and more their giggles and nonsense talk and idle chatter just weren’t enough for her when her thoughts were on her very alone son and his worrisome city. She did not want to escape, she wanted to be involved and help and heal, for once. The pulse of the world had let its weak self be heard and it needed every one of them. She had decided to put her spare time to good use, and as Darius took on less and less of a teaching load and the household income began to shrink, Lala Adam put the years of advanced English classes to the test. She began committing herself to work, really becoming a working-woman, taking anything that was there that paid but did not demand she really know things. So she looked to kids, the school system, and took whatever position let her remain credential-less. After helping in the cafeteria she was promoted to teacher’s aide and soon she was assisting barely adult teachers assist barely five-year-old children. It was good for her, she thought, but it was physically taxing. And thus, sleep disturbances were not helpful. Oh, I need every bit of right mind I can get! she would remind him over and over.

  He understood and he was sorry. Suddenly they were agreeing. Yes, wife, something is wrong with me. I know. Yes, now more than ever, I know. I’m sorry. Darius Adam was suddenly apologizing.

  “When I was a child we had a dog,” he suddenly mumbled to her one morning, after she’d begrudgingly shoved over his toast and tea, after a night when it had gotten particularly bad, when it was quite possible that neither of them had gotten any sleep at all. “This dog would howl all night. When my mother would tell him to stop, he’d bark. My mother would kick him, then he’d whine. She’d put him outside and he’d scream and throw himself at the door. The dog was a wreck. He never slept. Finally, after years of putting up with this dog, my mother one day took him outside to the shed, and all we heard was a single gunshot. He was gone. Nobody cried. We couldn’t even bring ourselves to think we missed him.”

  He stared into the dark pool of his tea, waiting for her to say something, some mean-spirited quip even, like a snappy, Are you suggesting something? But he got nothing. She ignored him. The sleeplessness had begun to make him feel like a ghost—half or less of his former self at least—and now her treatment confirmed it.

  It was effective. One day as she began to walk out the door without a “good-bye,” he called to her, “Please!” It had been a while since he had pleaded with his wife. Have I ever even? He didn’t recall ever caring enough.

  She stepped inside and closed the door, for a second closing her eyes. When she opened them, he existed to her and she made sure he knew it. She said, “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  She said, “It’s not your fault. You are sick, you are mad, I don’t know and you don’t know! I don’t think you will go to a doctor! I don’t think you will take pills! I don’t think you will listen.”

  She put her fist in her other hand, as if in reminder to restrain herself. She said, “You know what I think. … I think you are depressed! I think you know you are killing yourself and you want that! For most people, I would say that is so selfish—forget a husband, but you’re a father! But for you … well, you’ve made it easy for yourself, no? What do you have to feel selfish about? You pretend you don’t even have a child. You’re not being a father anyway! What does it matter if you were dead, right!” She flung her keys to the ground. She said, “I didn’t come up with that. You did. Goddamn you, admit that was your thinking, not mine.” Eventually she stopped waiting for him and left, slamming the door. That day—his worst yet—he didn’t go to work. He didn’t eat, he didn’t do anything. He was in the same place she had left him when she came home, her face still red with anger and possibly some embarrassment.

  She said, “Say something.”

  He thought the only thing he could report for the day was that he had tried to buy into what he was becoming, what she was seeing: a nothing. All day this thought had transported him to some abstract plane, where like the panic daydreams of his childhood, when he’d shoot down any idyllic scenes of old people hiking arm in arm with God through winding green mountain paths, he’d try to really envision death by first envisioning nothingness—the closest thing to it for him being a big white projection screen at a movie theater, blank and infinite and thingless not to mention thoughtless—and he had realized existing through a paralyzed brain like his was not so different from that nothingness. He had no thoughts.

  He was so deep in the thick mucus of oblivion that he didn’t notice the moment when her face crumpled a bit and her eyes grew moist—Oh, the old Darius would have bought tickets to see this! she thought—and so she sat down next to him and listened to him breathe for a while, trying to think of something to do, say, do, anything.

  “Darius, if I suggest something will you listen to it without losing it, without blowing up?”

  He didn’t nod but he didn’t protest either. She assumed it took too much energy to nod and she reminded herself of one of her favorite Americanisms: silence means consent.

  “Okay, Darius, because it has occurred to me what it is—your mess of the head comes at the same time the world is in a mess of everything. … Wouldn’t you say there is a link? And maybe a personal one? And that the link has a name? And that his name … Darius, his name, I am going to say it. …”

  S
till no reaction.

  “Darius, would you really say it’s an accident that you have become like this and just weeks ago, he, your son—yes, the son you stopped speaking to many months ago after a trip to New York, which, remember, came about because once upon a time you did not feel this way—in any case, can it be linked to how your son right now is living only blocks away from where one of the greatest tragedies of this USA took place, where they are still in a panic?”

  Nothing.

  “Darius, this is about … Xerxes.” There. His silence was beginning to piss her off, making her bolder. “I am not going to be there for you, no more turning around when you beg ‘please,’ nothing from me, unless you do the thing you were to do months ago.”

  For a second, the cobwebs cleared—literally cobwebs, he saw, barely visible translucent strings of white, like that spit of spiders, clouding his eyes, as if his eyes were suddenly coated in the goo of his head, and soon his whole body, he wagered, entangled, surely it was trying to bind him up, so tight eventually he’d turn to goo-baked sculpture—but for the second the sickly web got punctured and he literally felt a blast of fresh air in front of him, he saw his house, his living room, his wife, her clothes, her hand, her question mark. Her hand that was on his.

  He snapped out of it and managed to make out the one word in his head: “What?”

  “You have to tell me what happened with Xerxes. In detail. Now.” She suddenly saw his eyes go from blank to barely there to horror-struck.

  “What are we doing? What happened?” he said.

  “We made an agreement,” she declared, and went to their bedroom to slip into some sweats, something comfy so she could stomach what she already knew was going to be epic, if it was going to happen at all. It was perfectly possible that she was about to spend an entire evening staring at her statue of a husband stubbornly, until he was able to burst out of his paralyzing, somehow protective, plaster.