Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  When she finally came back to sit next to him, it was much later, he sensed, and she came with a glass of water and a bowl full of leftover rice for Darius, knowing well that he hadn’t eaten all day without her and that this was the best a man who couldn’t even muster the need for the toilet could stomach.

  He managed a sigh, a nod. He looked at her and at the rice and water and was reminded of his old dog. Outside it was night, too, and he could see it, her guiding him by the hand, cooing him out, he for once without bark or whine, knowing something was coming, being taken inside, and bang!

  “What, after all, do you have to lose, you jerk?” she said, brandishing instead of a shotgun to his canine head, a spoonful of rice to his slowly unhinging, dry, but still amazingly human mouth.

  She had said a very true thing, he registered. He had nothing. He let the morsels of rice find their own way down his throat, let her flood them with a sloppy downpour of tap water that half-trickled down his chin as he kept that mouth slightly unhinged to remind himself, yes, sure, he’d go ahead, he could do it, he had nothing to lose, nothing at all, when he’d already lost the only thing a man, a father, had to lose.

  Suzanne remembered everything—or rather, like all healthy sleepers, she remembered most things, enough for her to one day, late in the fall, seemingly out of the blue, turn to him and ask, “So why don’t you and your father talk?”

  Just the thought of that question—a question he often dreaded—inspired some horrible physical sensations in him. Immediately he felt his skin crawl as if being pricked by some supposedly-good-foryou but no-doubt-evil puncturing instrument, with a pressure and piercing that made him feel as if he was getting three-hole punched.

  He opened the window and turned away from his computer, upon which he was once again job-searching—scrolling endlessly through fruitless Web sites, reading descriptions most of the day until it was time to go to Kinko’s and fax his own descriptions back. It was awful. Suzanne had no idea—vocation and she did not compute. She was an artist, she said—she’d go to galleries, take a class here and there, read trendy art history books, and once in a while face a canvas fruitlessly. She didn’t work and she didn’t need to—she had put it this way herself, “Look I don’t want to say I’m exactly a trust fund kid. …” But she didn’t pay rent. Didn’t pay bills. Didn’t pay airfare. Charged clothes and food and other items to “the account.” It wasn’t going anywhere. He was amazed more than he was spiteful.

  Questions, on top of it all—they generated some spite and much anxiety. “Oh, Suze, it’s such a … long and … long story.”

  “Well, not if you don’t want to get into it,” she said. “Never mind then.”

  He confirmed her kind never mind with a kiss but just days later, when they had decided to have a nice Friday night dinner out at Suzanne’s favorite Italian eatery, she took his fairly stable mood and their many glasses of wine as a road in.

  “Xerxes, you’ve dodged it before—and might I add, a little weirdly—but I do have to ask again—I’m scared I’ll keep asking this if you never answer, let me warn you—but your father … are you never going to get into why you guys don’t talk? I mean, just say it if that’s the case and I guess I’ll never ask it again—but, I mean, then it makes it sound so terrible, makes me think there’s homicide or something involved, you know. …”

  He groaned. He looked to the bottle for help and, frustrated at its emptiness, ordered another glass—for himself and for her. He knew it was hopeless and yet he didn’t blame her. It was normal enough, the question, or so she thought. “But, Suzanne, right here, right now?”

  She shrugged, as if to say why not and so, swiftly, suicidally, with a quick swig, he did it. Without too much backstory—which he knew was a risk, was no doubt bound to make the actual events, not to mention both father and son, all look like bad cardboard cutouts of some unrounded-out melodrama—he spilled the events of a little less than a year before. He tried to tell himself he was a different man then—no better or worse, not fair to get into all that, just different.

  “… ta da!” he concluded glumly. He was glad for the wine. He didn’t know how it would have been possible—this rehashing that was barely five minutes of detached denouement—without some toxin to keep him burning inside.

  She didn’t say much, just nodded, opting to nibble at the last scraps of bread in the basket over her still half-eaten entrée.

  “There you are,” he went on, drinking away as if it was water, meanwhile ignoring his water glass altogether. “Happy, right?”

  She went right on chewing dumbly, looking as neutral as a font, not saying a word, for once—and she was not a reserved girl, this Suzanne—until after dinner as they walked briskly home. To his own shock, it was he who had to bring it up.

  “Well?!” he snapped, the alcohol fueling his fire all the more. “I mean, there you are, always begging for that story and there I go finally telling you everything and that’s it! We stop conversing altogether? I mean, call me crazy but I think when someone goes through that, what I did, explaining their life’s biggest problem, really, they’d deserve something, some kind of response! I mean, that’s my everything!”

  She stopped as he hoped she would and they sat down on somebody’s stoop in the cold night. He had never blown up at her like that before, he who all along was just grateful, if not downright bedazzled, at her very existence in his world.

  “Xerxes, do you really expect me to take that as your everything?” she slowly asked, pausing. As if sensing he would have no response to that, she went on, “That a visit with your dad last year, that had some rough parts, the boiling point being a walk with him at Christmastime in which he tells you about something fucked-up that he and some neighborhood boys used to do—which, look, I am taking very seriously by even saying ‘fucked-up,’ an expression I don’t like to use, fucked-up indeed, and horrible, yes—but do you expect me to sit here and say, yes, okay, that makes sense, that is a very valid reason to totally disown your own father? It’s a very valid reason to fight and maybe have it ricochet on to other fights, in which it becomes a symbol of larger things—I am assuming these are the dimensions it has taken or something—but to totally have the man shut out, when I’m willing to bet—based on nothing but my own parents, and yes, I know all unhappy families are different (how does that go?), but based on my own father, who’s roughly the same age, I’ll bet, where he’s at emotionally at this time in his life, not to mention being a Middle Eastern man in a world like this, I’ll bet he needs you, that he’s not okay with this … and so why, oh, tell me why, Xerxes, would you really expect me to digest that perfectly?”

  A million thoughts raced through his head—retorts, explanations, annotations, footnotes, translations, important paragraphs of backstory, a half dozen references, a few rewinds and a couple of fast-forwards, a logical outlining, a demonic explosion, an I’m sorry, a you’re right, a fuck you, a who the fuck are you in my life—and he resorted to the most meaningless one to cap that destroyed night of their first true fight,

  “Suzanne, your father isn’t even fully Middle Eastern, if I remember correctly, and so you want to talk about a Middle Eastern man in a world like this? Okay, sure, my father, but don’t forget—sure, ME!!!”

  He later thought about it some more and when it occurred to him that he wasn’t regretting it the way he thought he would, he decided it was because it wasn’t as meaningless as he had initially thought.

  He thought it was possible that it was hypnosis: Lala’s eyes drilling deep into his like that, waiting for his something that neither was sure was coming—but it was worth however long she had just sat there for if only Darius would give her that something, she insisted, all eyes—and so there he was pretending to think back, squinting his eyes for effect, mustering the energy to scratch a temple even as he imagined thinkers did, praying that his wife wouldn’t lose patience with him, praying that instead she’d just tire of this and move on and leave him alone, a
nd even if she didn’t, he prayed that somehow, miraculously, her eyes looking at him like that would hypnotize him and then he’d fall into some semiconscious state that he was sure had to count as a sleep of sorts.

  “December 2000, Darius,” she began whispering, whispering as if pleading, he interpreted, either that or he had hallucinated her whisper, or perhaps his ears were now giving way, too, that suddenly her speaking voice was registering as a whisper, Oh God. “December 2000, almost a year ago, you and Xerxes in New York. You and your son … an argument? C’mon, you.”

  It was like a riddle. That idea cracked him up for a second and he felt the laughter, like an only superficially soothing cough medicine, suddenly unnaturally lubricate his guts. It was good—temporary, but good. “Give me a hint,” he said, hoping she would laugh back.

  She scowled. “This is pathetic,” she said, still speaking barely audibly. She thought back to that December 2000 week, discovering Gigi, perhaps Marvin, the long walks, the feeling of liberation, still expecting phone calls that didn’t come until the day of Darius’s arrival. “Not a single call that whole week but the day you were coming back, from the airport. I asked you how he was and you kept saying you’d tell me when you got here. Which you didn’t. You know what else you said, Darius? You said he was doing badly. You made it sound like he hated us. That’s a really cruel thing to say when you know you’re never going to talk about it again, don’t you think?”

  She had a good memory. Once, he did, too. As if in homage to that old mind of his, a sentence, as good a duplicate as could be processed out into his extramental universe, leaked out of him: “I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about him ever again.’”

  She nodded. “And yet here you are, going to do it. Darius, if you don’t, I am taking you to a hospital—no, better yet, an insane asylum. You want that?”

  He didn’t. He wanted to remind her that they both knew he didn’t belong like that—he was just … temporarily disabled. Still, that woman, his wife, you couldn’t count on her—there was no telling what she could be capable of. The insane asylum could arrive like another bad chapter. “Okay, okay … it’s coming … I can … I can feel it … slowly. …” he stalled.

  She rolled her eyes, swallowed, sighed, and waited.

  “Yes … yes … it’s coming. …” he was genuinely trying to extract and assemble the old story: where would he start, where would it be right to start, what started it, what the hell really happened, why did it get like that, did he, did he, was he really not speaking to his son now for almost a year?! For a second it horrified him—the reality of it lay pulsing and raw in front of him, stripped of anything but the gory truth: he had abandoned his own son. It was awful. He thought he could feel something else in his system about to die out. Oh, an insane asylum, he wondered if it could help, perhaps just for a few days. Why did he ever go there, to him, in the first place?

  “I went there,” he began, wishing she could fully appreciate this, how difficult it was getting the words out, getting the words out at the same time he was examining the memory, difficult and even physically exhausting, “because I wanted to see for myself how he was. What he had become. Why he had left. What we had done to him. What being an adult made him. I didn’t know him anymore. Every year that went by, I knew him less and less, it seemed. …”

  He could detect a sudden light in her eyes, a hint of smile—she wanted to be encouraging but not overly so, as she did, after all, want him to go on. She realized she really had no idea what went on in his head, maybe ever. Who was this Darius Adam of hers?

  “I’m his father, I have a right,” he went on, and he closed his eyes, as they did in movies when they were about to be transported to another place and another time, and he was amazed to discover that it helped. “And his apartment, his life, everything was a mess. He had no real job. He still doesn’t, you say. He went to school, left us for, as I suspected, nothing but to be away. Food, even, you should have seen it—we ate … pebbles.”

  “Pebbles? Like rocks?”

  “Well, no, but almost. A bad, crunchy, colored, dry thing—” the word for that breakfast food—the stuff you had with milk, the stuff kids liked, but sometimes adults also, especially the more boring type, the stuff in the cardboard box—escaped him. “Never mind. He had no food really. He hadn’t even told us he was poor. Except somehow he had money for this apartment which cost more than ours. We never wondered how, did we. …” She had a hint of a shrug for that, he saw, looking at her through an open slit in his shut eyes. She never worried about the details. “Well, the entire week we didn’t get along. Suddenly, here we were: just two men, two men.” He stopped. That was deep.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Father and son, suddenly, just two men,” he repeated. “For the first time. Wanting to get to know each other. He didn’t like me, either. I got on his nerves. I took … naps. He … went out.”

  “Okay, so you spent time alone,” she said impatiently. “What was he doing out while you … slept, I guess?”

  He thought about the instances. Outside it had been snowing. The paper, Xerxes would go to get the paper, and meanwhile he would sleep. Maybe dream even. Shireen, she had been there more than ever in his head, curling up at his side when her brother was gone, trying to console him, telling him she’d never leave. He couldn’t tell her that—he looked at Lala’s large, sane, logical eyes and never had they looked so sane and logical. The point was that he didn’t know, he realized. He could barely admit to himself that he had no idea where Xerxes would go, knowing only that he would take a while and that he would barely miss him.

  “Walks? That’s what they do in that city, I guess. Anyway, he wanted to be away. …” and he could feel something come over him, maybe even hypnosis, as it wasn’t sleep, but it was something, a spell, making the words come, words he hadn’t even tried to choose, suddenly so slippery, so out, “… they take off … they fly away … WHAT?!” he suddenly heard himself shout, as if echoing a “WHAT” he thought she had said. She looked at him frowning, her mouth closed, closed for a while. He had said something. Something odd. They take off, they fly away … and in return he had gotten in his head, wings, wings flapping—he felt them as clearly as he saw them—a different time and place, white wings, flapping so hard against the canyons of his gray matter and their dull-throbbing neuron caves, a flapping that went from brushing to slapping, whipping almost, flapping back and forth wildly, madly—

  “Go on, Darius.”

  —oh he could literally feel his brainstuffs being pushed around, loosened even, like balls bouncing askew all at once against a giant divine racket—back and forth they’d sweep him, chilling him with their breeze, blinding him with that white blur, white as all hotness, white as, yes, fire, flapping so hard that like stick against stick, feather against feather, they created fire—

  “Oh, you’re drooling.” She wiped his mouth with her finger, trying to lower her eyes so he couldn’t see it, again a tear. She couldn’t believe what he had become—was this really it? Old age? Was it really over? She almost longed for that mad lively Darius, the old big boom of a bastard, the heavy step, the hot hand, the ready tongue. Her old man, where was he?

  He was somewhere else: stargazing in a courtyard, lost in strange and parallel streets, Tehran, New York, young boys, grown men, kerosene and lighter, Christmas lights and Christmas lights, in his hand, in front of him, the smell of burning, burned nuts, in the distance hung and falling like fireworks, lit white and blue, hell, doves, peace—it was all, it was all coming together. …

  Before he knew it, there it really came: avalanche-like, saved up from the decades, oh, it has been a while, that he knew as he felt the wetness from his unseeing eyes to his barely feeling face. He was weeping. “Oh, Darius,” he heard. He couldn’t open his eyes long enough to see her matching tears—it was definitely a first, the couple crying together, as they hadn’t even done that on their wedding day. “Darius, please.” But he wasn’t stopp
ing, saying things in between heaves and sniffles that she couldn’t understand, with his eyes closed, bawling the way infants do, holding on to her even, still trying to reason and remember, the helpless terrified wreck. It scared her to see it, she had to admit, and so she held him until, after a very long while, he grew quiet again.

  “Okay, that’s enough, Darius,” she whispered, wanting to be gentle with him, wanting to give the poor guy a rest. Whatever it was, it was heavy. And besides, sleep deprivation made people emotional. “You’re off the hook. Why don’t you just lie there for a bit and try to rest? You want to try to have some more rice, some water, tea?”

  He shook his head. But he wasn’t done. He tried to say, But you can’t leave me like this, after all that, I had just begun, I am in it now, but he couldn’t. He opened his mouth and nothing. It was so frustrating that he couldn’t feel embarrassed about crying like that, the embarrassment trigger in him, like the anger apparatus, certainly disabled as well.

  She tried to pry his tugging hand off her. “Okay, okay, you’re off the hook. Try to sleep, okay!” but he insisted. “For heaven’s sake, what the hell, Darius? What are you trying to tell me?”

  He let out what he hoped would be a rather normal yell, but instead he got a scream—a woman’s scream even, he had to admit—just to tear his voice right out. And before she could even be horrified, he said, “I’m sorry, my voice was stuck, wait—”

  “Darius, you’re really worrying me, really really worrying me … I have to lie down now. …”

  “I have to say something,” he said, and so, wearily, she sat down and looked at him with the mixture of annoyance and care of old wives. And so before he could lose it again, he began, and suddenly his voice and thoughts were clearer than ever, realigning themselves like an old memorized prayer, everything falling into place—the boys, the night, the lighter, the kerosene, the birds, the stars—everything, it was out.