Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  Her humming abruptly ended and in one sentence, she let the remnants of her luck pour all over him. “Oh, Darius! God, don’t you think that’s it?”

  And as if he could feel something hot was in her, he didn’t question it, he just egged it on: “Say it, woman, just say it. …”

  “Well,” Lala began, her voice sounding sweeter to him than ever, “You know, for many years nobody had any hope for my brother. When I say he was lost, I mean he was lost. People only had rumors, nobody could reach him, and soon I couldn’t even reach the nobodies who couldn’t reach him! He was gone to me. This is really My Miracle. But you know, all it took was my brother deciding to write to me and suddenly he was found. Things don’t need to be lost always. There are ways to reach someone, and successfully. And if I can hear from the one person I was never supposed to hear from, certainly you could reach out, too? If I were more superstitious I could say this thing happened with something more in store for you, too! Not that it’s a sign, but well … Darius, do you know what I’m saying?”

  He knew immediately. “I could write Xerxes a letter,” he uttered perfectly, as if hypnotized, like a magician’s lovely assistant eager to submit herself for onstage dismembering.

  She applauded and hugged him and kissed him and they fell asleep in each other’s arms. That night, Darius slept well believing in it all, suddenly able to believe.

  As it goes with Darius Adam, the sentiment did not quite last. The next morning, when he awoke, the whole thing had lost its shimmer—the bright halo had slipped down a bit, threatening to become a burning noose around his neck. It wasn’t My Miracle, it might not even be My Inspiration, he thought. After all, what could a letter do that couldn’t be solved with a phone call—Lala: As if you would! Ha! You would never call him, you know that—and she was right, but it was as if Lala was asking him to believe in something more abstract than the will of God … the inherent magic of letters perhaps, as if it were the medium her brother had chosen that had made the thing come together, as if those little pieces of envelope you shoved into those big blue boxes on the street would then go to some fairy farm to be placed into the beaks of mystical carrier pigeons, who would fly so high they would glaze the letters in the divine haze of the heavens, and by creating the invisible ribbon of connection across the globe at any distance, bequeath the lost with their long-sought communication. … Oh, it’s madness, even if beautiful madness! Darius thought, again feeling pessimism coat his very afraid insides.

  “Darius, there is no other choice,” his wife insisted, bringing him a sheet of paper and a pen, as if the tools were half the battle. “Now you are going to do this.”

  The flip side was that when one considered to do beautifully mad things, one was already at the point where there was nothing to lose. So he nodded slowly, still slightly unconvinced, and took the pen. He noticed his hands were shaking badly. He could sense her watching him with a teary-eyed smile.

  “You’re going to just watch me like that?” Darius asked. “It will take a while, you know.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Just for a bit,” she murmured, and a bit embarrassed, in a voice that was barely perceptible, added, “I want to imagine him—you know, see what it looks like when a lost man reaches out to his lost loved one.”

  It was too much, what she had said. He could not turn back, as much as he wanted to. And so he gathered the courage to, right in front of her, in wobbly script, write down the first two words:

  Dear Son

  He wrote several drafts that evening, all the way into the early hours of the morning. He even chose special stationery—that of a Zoroastrian temple he had once visited—hoping it would somehow, as much as he was ashamed to believe in it, “bless” the letter. In the end the draft he chose was the shortest, just a list really, summing up his life. He did not want to seem intrusive—he wanted to be natural. The problem was that he had forgotten how to be natural with his son—he worried they had never been natural to begin with.

  Feel free not to respond, as I predict anyway, he decided to end it with, for Opposite Day’s sake. Now that was natural. That was him. His son might even appreciate that—an old bit of the father he had to remember, as well as a gesture toward an out. Charm + utility! Because as much as he longed for a letter back, he did not need Xerxes to be aware of that. The whole operation had to be blessed with normalcy—if it could come across as normal, while it actually felt abnormal to Darius, there would be some hope for success.

  In the morning, with little sleep to keep him standing—still, the last few weeks of sleep disturbances had kept him used to operating in such poor physical condition—he took the letter to the post office.

  “You really did it?” Lala asked later that evening, when he announced it to her. “You really, really did it, Darius?!”

  “Yes,” he said numbly. He did not know how to feel. Mostly, it made him nervous.

  “Well, that is wonderful!” she cried. She looked at him piercingly and said firmly, “Darius, something will have to come of this, you understand me? Something will come, we must be patient!” Her words for a second seemed more desperate than assuring. It had already been several weeks since she had sent out her letter and, although she was nowhere near losing hope, the waiting was tough at times. “You have to want it so bad. Do you want something good to happen, Darius? Are you open to it?”

  He thought about it and imagined the mystical great white carrier pigeon skimming clouds on the way to the other coast, finally presenting the letter to a boy whose face he could not see, the boy taking the letter in his hands, then the boy creating his own, handing that one over to the bird, the bird doing its thing again, and the magical ribbon of communication making it to its promised full circle. He nodded.

  The letter made it. But Darius Adam never found out for sure, because the letter’s ultimate home was atop a generous blanket of dust under the wire springs of a steel bed frame in one corner of the East Village apartment of Xerxes Adam.

  And if the pigeon could have argued the delivery status in any way with Darius Adam, it would have insisted the ribbon had not yet snapped—it was just very tautly tugged now, as tensely as two points could pull a line before its breaking.

  Part Seven

  Homelands

  They held the fort on New Year’s 2002. That was their joke. Oh, we’re not going to do anything—nah, we think we’ll skip it—we hate New Year’s anyway—we’re gonna play it safe—oh, we’re just gonna hold the fort that night, just this year. Xerxes shrugged it off halfheartedly. As if the fort could be held, was what he really thought. The fort couldn’t even be counted on to properly exist, much less be held by anyone.

  Still, people expected another worst and pretended they didn’t, as 2001, to the good riddance of all, did away with itself.

  8:30 p.m., Pacific Time: Lala and Darius’s New Year’s Eve celebration consisted of simply staying tuned. They had stopped making a big deal of it once Xerxes was grown—the young Xerxes after all was the force that would get them to tune in to Dick Clark one minute, that would, the next minute, order them to the balcony to watch the fire in the sky and listen to gunshots while he stayed inside holding his breath, reminding them to hurry back in when he sensed it had to be over, eager to trade in spectacle for normalcy. Their New Year’s Eve observance was scheduled for exactly a half hour before the East Coast’s New Year’s, with the TV on as their link. On every channel the world unabashedly put its concerned eyes on Times Square—everybody was pretending that it was just New York’s New Year that year. But the televised Times Square might as well have been a taped video of years before had it not been for the many American flags and the “We Will Never Forget” banners. The still indestructible stubborn hordes gathered in full for that pin to drop. It was as if they had to; if you didn’t go on with things, they said, that other they had won. Lala loved this spirit, this fierce, blind, backward, overdone investment. It was as if they were burning their dinner on purpose—preferring co
al to food. She had lived this way every day of her life—it was her secret to survival. You let your counterintuition take over and they don’t win. Neither do you, but nobody’s asking.

  Midnight, Eastern time (according to Suzanne’s watch, still 11:55 according to Xerxes’s; but they didn’t argue): Suzanne began counting down and Xerxes thought to himself, after correcting her gently once, then twice, finally Who cares, let her have it—after all, better she be early, in case. She could still have her countdown. Better, he thought, better that he be counting down negative numbers than having his countdown cheated of its hopefully still-as-hell zero.

  9:05 p.m., Pacific Time: Lala and Darius went to bed before their own New Year’s. The left coast’s didn’t matter. Darius reminded her, mumbling as they hit the lights and crawled under the covers, that their own Iranian New Year’s was still over two months away anyway.

  12:05 a.m., Eastern time: When the clock struck twelve, according to his watch, plus an extra second or two, Xerxes sighed. They had gone through two of their midnights—it was certain. They: okay. The fort: held. A New Year. 2002. A nice even number. Palindromic. Stable. Not the first year of a millennium, the second. The children’s rhyme, how did it go? First is the worst, second is the best. Yes. They could move on.

  January 2, 2002: California was fine. New York felt okay.

  Nobody on the East Coast took the kind, lesser cold of that January for granted. They deserved it, New Yorkers said. Things were getting better and the weather, it was throwing them a bone. Suzanne swore she saw people smiling more, she felt that she was breathing better, easier exhales, as if her lungs were clearing themselves of whatever residual scarring they had undergone from the bad air of the last season. The city is being born again, Suzanne would declare, it’s as if winter for once means renewal not death! He was glad, but how could anyone trust it?

  Because there were days—perhaps just a few days after the terror threat level had been heightened, when the news had some new tidbit to dash like extra oil onto an already burning skillet—when Xerxes would get a wave of the old tension. One time in particular that January, Suzanne and Xerxes were taking a very packed rush hour subway uptown to meet Suzanne’s friends for dinner. Xerxes, rarely having had the sort of employment that would require seeing what 5:30 p.m. on the New York subways looked like, was a bit horrified at the overcrowding. There was no chance of a seat so they crammed into each other in a corner, and he held her tight to him when noticing she was also crammed against three other men. He could hear waves of conversation, some louder than others, some whispers, many coughs. So many suits, he noticed. And police. One particularly fat cop, who was in the corner talking to a thin old cop, lifted his shirt for a second in a casual scratching gesture and, totally unembarrassed and unconcerned, revealed a whole network of wiring all across and up his fat white belly. Xerxes closed his eyes—Maybe it would just be better to close your eyes, he told himself. But Suzanne was going on and on about Valentine’s Day, where they could spend it, an island, upstate, a different state, the other coast. Doesn’t sound doable, too extreme, dunno, Xerxes was mumbling, while opening his eyes periodically and making some worrying eye contact with someone who happened to be staring right at him. We could get off now, take a cab, he thought to himself, but he imagined what hell it would be to make it through all those hordes to get to the door. Even when the door opened and the train stopped it seemed as if nobody was getting off or getting in. He did not think it was a horrible exaggeration to consider them all trapped. All it would take, after all, was a tragedy outside, a tragedy beyond the glass—hell, a tragedy inside, anywhere—for their situation to register as potentially fatal entrapment. He could feel himself growing hot, then cold, then hot, over and over. In a sort of distance, spiraling gingerly through his right ear, he could just barely make out Suzanne’s almost motorized rambles. The crowd was squirming, arranging and rearranging like a snake taking the shape of its route, making way, making some natural way, apparently, for a blind man to get off. His guiding stick was helping but still, in a crowd like that, people were getting prodded and poked and trying their best not to hiss. With his free hand, the blind man grabbed for poles and when he got close to them, he actually grabbed Suzanne’s shoulder by mistake. Hey, Xerxes accidentally snapped. Several people, including Suzanne, shot him dirty looks—What’s wrong with you, he was, you know, Suzanne whispered, upset—but the blind man was off, and the train was rumbling on. It sounded louder than usual to Xerxes. We could get off and try a different train, maybe they’re not all so bad, he thought to himself. But he couldn’t imagine making it through. It was not until they were a stop away that the train actually froze, stalling between stops—something that Xerxes was well used to in the city, but this time, he panicked. Great, he snapped, what do we do?! Hot, cold, cold, hot. Suzanne looked at him perplexed, No big deal, Xerxes. It’s just a usual stall. Xerxes waited for the conductor, even an automated one, but nothing. He never understood why the conductors didn’t communicate better. Had they seen it all? Was that it? Nothing moved them? They had forgotten that the public might not think like them? Xerxes scanned the eyes of the passengers. The cops were chuckling loudly to themselves, all the others just reading their books, eying their papers, staring at their feet, a few still looking over at him. He couldn’t take it. He was burning. It had been a long time. He was freezing. What the hell, how long has this been, he snapped under his breath. Suzanne kissed his cheek and told him to calm down, asked if he’d ever been to the Vineyard, maybe that was a good romantic possibility? Xerxes shook his head and stared at the door’s glass. Pitch-black. He could vaguely hear another train zoom by on the other tracks, without a hitch. Where were they? Were they not telling them what was going on because they were worried about public reaction? Like not telling a kid bad news to prevent crying? Were they going to be surprised? Xerxes was irate; this lack of information, this black nothing, this entrapment—they were entitled to more. He wanted to stand up and scream, What are we all doing here anyway? But instead, he muttered, a light mutter that Suzanne either didn’t hear or found it easy enough to ignore, I don’t get it, Su, why won’t it open. … He suddenly felt half his body turning into ice while the other was melting into ash, perfectly splitting off each other, as if sense and nonsense, heaven and hell, were trying to tear him apart in a second. He endured it. Giving up made his panic more manageable. What do I have to live for anyway?—he ran that question through his head all the while the train sat immobilized. Eventually it got moving again and once out and back up and in the New York air, Xerxes, like a spring, bounced back into form—that was what New York did to you, you were Gumby, you were superhuman, you could forgive and forget, because if you could take it there, you could take it anywhere—and like the rest of the residents of the island, he forgot moments like those enough to take it from day to day.

  As the newness of January wore off they began getting restless. It was getting maddening, all the waiting for nothing. Getting the mail had become an exercise in extreme maturity, a daily drill in dealing with disappointment, a constant lesson in moving on and thinking positively. It was killing Darius more than Lala even. Every evening, he and his wife would review the day’s stack of nonsense mail, coupon packets, and bills hoping for one of their dear New York male relatives to acknowledge them, but over and over, there was nothing.

  I knew it, he would grumble. I know my son! He hates me. Why would he bother to write me that in a letter?

  Stop giving up, she would say, glad that she could keep saying it, meaning he wasn’t actually there yet. Something might happen, who knows with these lost guys? …

  It was a given that she would hear from her lost guy first. But when she did, it was not what she thought it would be.

  “Who the hell is Carla Vane?!” she shouted out loud when the letter from Brooklyn finally came, with a return address she knew was the one that had been on his envelope, as she had memorized it long before that point. It was all
very perfect except one minor detail: the sender’s name. It was not Bob Nezami, it was Carla Vane.

  Inside the envelope was Lala’s letter to Bobak and the envelope she had sent it in. There was a large Post-it note stuck on the letter, with tiny, neat, old-lady-ish cursive on it. It read:

  Hello, wrong addy, no BOBACK, VANES here for the past 18 years. Sorry it’d open, we don’t get a lot of wrong addies here. Good luck—Carla Vane

  Carla Vane’s address was printed on a gold sticker in the upper left-hand portion of her envelope, so Lala proceeded to double-check Carla’s address against the one that Bobak had written on his envelope. She couldn’t believe it—the addresses were identical. Did her brother really write his own address incorrectly?! Was Carla Vane lying? Was she keeping her brother hostage?!

  “Maybe he doesn’t want you to find him,” Darius suggested.

  “Why did he write in the first place then?!” she snapped.

  Darius thought about it. “He said he had been in hospitals,” Darius said. “Maybe he’s, you know, not all there.”

  She knew he had a point, but still it hurt to think of him that way. She decided that, fake address or not, she would have to try other routes. Namely, the ones she didn’t want to try, like tracking down Marvin for possible answers. She didn’t know where he lived or where he worked or anything about him these days, so again it meant calling Gigi for his cell phone number. After all, she still wondered from time to time if he had had a hand in all of this—she thought he had to have, but wondered how he could be lying so low when his investigation had actually succeeded.