She prayed Gigi would pick up, even though she would see Lala’s number and not want to.
However Gigi, feeling especially hateful, saw the number, and did. She picked up, without a word of greeting.
“Gigi, this is Lala,” said Lala, her voice shaking a bit from nervousness. They hadn’t spoken in many months.
“LALA??!! LAAA-LAAA??!!!” Gigi’s shrill scream disintegrated into hellish cackles and before Lala could interrupt, she was given the only answer Gigi had for her: a dial tone, and thus a decisive dead end.
Damn it! It was frustrating but instead of killing Lala’s resolve, it amazingly made her stronger. She wrote a thank-you letter to Carla Vane and moved forward. There was, of course, the 4-1-1-information route: he was, of course, not listed. And then there was the Internet: when she looked him up on the library computer she did indeed find him there—first, in the most shocking context: an article about a Bob Nezami who had tried to set himself on fire in a Kmart; and second, with his name on some activist Web site that claimed he was Bob Nezami, of Kennedy Mental Health Center, Brooklyn, NY, 11218. She was overjoyed at how easy it might be and so she called.
“Please, I am trying to find my brother who wrote to me not too long ago,” she blurted out to the KMH receptionist. “His name is Nezami, N-E-Z-A-M-I—”
She was put on hold for a long time. She did not care—she had waited her entire life for this, after all. But when the receptionist got back on, she reported with no feeling whatsoever in her voice, that there was no one with that name there.
“Oh, you’re kidding!” Lala shrieked. The Internet information was several years old, but she refused to believe it could bear no fruit. “Well, he was at your hospital, right?”
“Confidential, ma’am,” the receptionist said.
“I just want to know if he was ever there!”
“We cannot give that information, ma’am. Policy.”
Once Lala really lost it and demanded additional explanation of the stupid creepy slimy sick policy, she was put on hold again. For an even longer time. Before Lala could commit to hanging up, a supervisor with a gentle soothing voice came on the line.
Lala told her the entire story all over again.
“Okay, Mrs. Adams, if you are asking me if I would deny if a Mr. Nezami was ever here in our facility,” she said, almost sounding coy, “I can tell you no, I could not honestly deny it. How’s that? Now that’s all I can give you and that’s already fudging a bit with policy, so …”
Lala sighed. “Thank you, that’s great. Now when? Around when? The last year?”
“I would not be able to say he was not here in the last year, no,” she offered. Lala could not tell if it was some kind of joke to her or really some legal loophole vocabulary she had to use. The double negatives were dizzying but Lala made do.
“Was he there, say, two weeks ago?” Lala said, cooperating with the game.
“I believe I would be able to deny it.”
Eventually, Lala deduced that he had left a month or two ago. They could not tell her any more, nothing about who he was, the circumstances of his coming there, the circumstances of his leaving, where he was, nothing. Apparently they couldn’t know where he was either—once patients were out, they were out.
Once again, Lala was at a dead end. She needed investigators, detectives, bloodhounds! There were few options, she knew that, and she was eventually left to conclude they could all be tapped with only one route of action. There was no other choice. If he wasn’t going to come to her, she was just going to have to go to him. …
She had to go to New York. She had to try. And at the very least, her son was there. Just when the whole ordeal had felt too overwhelming for one woman to endure, she reminded herself it had come out of Her Miracle and she could save him and save him, too. She imagined herself swooping like some superhero over the skyline, swiftly coming in at them, and in one arm scooping up her brother and in the other arm her son, carrying them high above all the collapsing jets and the crumbling buildings and the horrific dead and the furious mobs. … And in return, gentlemen, she would shout through the wind, her hands morphing into talons, you will like it! You will see you had been so silly to hide! She would forgive them, but not without their first understanding that they had been wrong, that you simply did not leave Lala and Darius Adam hanging like this, clueless, in the dark of Eden.
And planes were still being diverted, threats were still being aired, the crime rate—while they claimed it was lower than before—was still bad, there were killers on the news, burglaries in their building, rapists around the corner, a stock market that was crashing over itself again and again, terror levels rising and falling but never falling to where they used to be, the news ignoring the new year, still struggling to work out 2001, 2001 over and over. … The only way to observe a change of any sort in New York was to notice that the posters all around the city of “the missing” were almost all gone. Xerxes couldn’t imagine watching someone rip them off. Nobody, after all, a whole season later, was getting found. People were just learning to give up, which was very different from letting go.
“I just don’t understand why,” he’d say, “of all the places—and I don’t ever have a real job or money or any real necessary reason—why of all places am I here? I’m not from here.”
“Maybe you’re here for me,” Suzanne would offer, looking a bit hurt. “For us.”
He’d kiss her on the head and rephrase, “Okay, fine, why the hell of all places are we here? We spend all our days glued to the news, gas mask by the door, waking up frantic at any noise in the middle of the night.”
She would hug him and say she understood—even though he suspected she didn’t, she of apocalyptic New York stock, whose coping mechanism was to never reveal that anything hurt her. But in her head she had a better reason, what was in most New Yorkers’ hearts, what she couldn’t really explain to him, so mystifying the allegiance was: she just could not abandon The City.
He would say, “I was dying to abandon fucking Los Angeles since I can remember.” And then she’d retort that Los Angeles wasn’t the greatest city, that was why, and then they would have one of their meaningless fights that was all about ideas and never about them. It bothered her that all this time the world had overshadowed them—they had barely had a chance to understand each other enough to fight about themselves.
One late night when he said it again—frustrated with the news now suddenly changing its mind and saying yes, their lungs actually were poisoned and the jet fuel could cause their children to be mutants, et cetera—wondering aloud, “Oh why, oh why, are we fucking here?” it suddenly occurred to her to say something that at first sounded like a joke, but then suddenly slipped itself into a seriousness, a seriousness so serious that she was doomed to keep it inside her, for just a little while, until she could really grasp what she even meant by it. …
She said, “Where would we go? What, Iran or something?”
He had glared at her, turned off the lights, and announced it was time to go to sleep, leaving them both awake and unready in the dark.
The truth was that Darius had been thinking about it, and seriously, on and off nonstop since the years following the Revolution, but he never knew just how real an option going to Iran could be. It could never be a vacation. To take that risk, not to mention the time off, the explanations, the throwing-all-practicality-to-the-wind—it would almost have to be a move, wouldn’t it? The notion haunted Darius. But Iran felt like the precise remedy to fill all the many holes in his life.
And particularly as Lala began to fade from him more and more, her eyes now turning eastward, he felt less and less comforted by his faux home. He could see it already: he was about to lose her to New York, too. First his son vaporizing into the steaming potholes and dark bustling undergrounds … and now his wife, too, ready to run through the unknown labyrinths of that strange notion, Brooklyn, through every shady possibly dangerous brownstoned street to the buzzing w
hite light of hospital corridors, searching for a man she never knew, this Bob, this brother that she had let go of in the moment when she went from daughter to orphan. She was looking for something she had never known, to add meaning to her life, to start anew with this lost element, while Darius was looking away from everyone he did know, to a place he once did, to start back where he began.
Nobody could ever prepare a man for the endless problems of family, he thought, sighing all the time, the way that old men he used to dread would, the way only his own old father never did.
Back when they were fresh from the Revolution, fresher at least, he used to think to himself, Just wait, when Xerxes grows up I will go back to Iran, Laleh will come, Xerxes will return, too. Just let him finish school. By then, things will get better over there, another Revolution to cleanse the false Revolution of its bloodstains. But nothing had changed—on the news the clips still featured those crowlike black-shrouded women, and men with their own faces hidden in beards, kids looking oily and thin and desperate, the streets blackening with the new neglect of only a few decades. … His homeland had become a cheap, grim, grainy, black-and-white horror movie.
Still, he asked: What if we went back to our own country, woman? It was a question he had asked her on and off, capriciously usually, out of nowhere, perhaps at the scent of a particular dish she had cooked, a glance at an old photo, a California landscape that seemed like something else—something his.
But that February, whenever he brought it up he would get a snap, Are you kidding? We can barely live here in peace. Or: What own country? That country is not my country nor is it yours. We left all that just to go back to that, in a worse hell than we left it? Or, even worse: Right, and leave everything? Money? Debt? Our son? Or should I say, my son? He had no answer. In a season of unrest, they always said men were supposed to crave stability, fear change, be more prudent than ever, more practical, more wise. Darius Adam wished it was the case for him, but it just wasn’t. He needed upheaval more than ever.
He secretly began researching airfares, calming himself with the notion that he was doing it just in case. Just good to know. After all, he reminded Lala, you never know when we’ll have to escape this new country with all its own problems, just like we did our own.
Lala would roll her eyes, knowing he was right to some extent, that he had some point, not a point that would take her back to Iran, but a point that was just as valid as any insanity in their era—she, however, was more intent than ever to stay on the continent. No, California was not enough—and as if her son’s absence wasn’t enough, here was another lost man in her life: her brother. Another man she could barely imagine from day to day, even though he, too, was her own blood. Another man in New York, this mysterious place where men seemed to go to get lost.
So she began researching airfares, but unlike him, quite openly. When he tried to reason, Fine, you’re doing it just in case, she snapped back, There is no “in case.” If I have ever done anything worthwhile this will be it.
And because all that was in his head was his own permanent move—the stability of the most unstable decision a Middle Eastern man in his era, in his situation, could make—Darius Adam took it as a decisive fissure in their partnership. They were over, was that it? Mother, with rights to child in child’s city, on one end of the continent; Father alone, not even with weekend visitation, no money to send, no inclusion in any milestones, surpassing the continent altogether and fleeing to the other side of the globe. It made him miserable. He began looking at Eden Gardens with an air of strange nostalgia, like an old lost land, already viewing it as their past, their old temporary housing, a historic rest stop where they crashed long enough to make their most meaningful memories … and now, suddenly, because of the air of irrationality that had spread through the universe, they had no choice but to follow that wild crazy tide and be scattered, off away to distant unknowable futures, alone.
They had won, he thought to himself. All of them had become brain-damaged, all of them knowingly about to set forth on the worst decisions of their lives. Nothing was sacred, there was no place to go but down. They were about to erase everything.
This is not about Iran, Lala would insist. This is still about Xerxes, I know it. …
He did not argue; he let his already low spirits get further swallowed by any grain of truth in her declaration—Xerxes, sure, it might as well be. On the days when he helped Lala research for Bob, he realized that in some way he related exactly to his wife’s long-lost brother: there was something to be said about fading men, always far away from the only things meaningful, making a stab at connection, throwing letters to the wind, letters that they had no way of navigating back to themselves in the first place.
He was going to be twenty-seven soon. It was, to put it mildly, disturbing.
Suzanne loved that his birthday was on Valentine’s Day, the day of lovers, that everyone pretended to hate, because it meant she got to really lay on the spectacle. Plus, after its fall, the whole city declared that every holiday, every reason to celebrate, must be extra stunning this year. She and Xerxes deserved it, after what they had been through—they more than deserved it. It would have to be big—she envisioned a long line of spectacular gifts, all one by one growing hotter and hotter, as he got closer and closer, approaching the pinnacle, the one biggest bang of a present.
The whole Valentine’s Day–birthday relationship embarrassed Xerxes. She knew this because once they had made it past just knowing each others’ signs—hers Cancer, his Aquarius—and he actually revealed the day as “February fourteenth” rather than “Valentine’s Day,” she had laughed and given him a kiss, finding it so very cute, and he had suddenly snapped, Please, it’s bad enough that it is what it is. He explained that he was a cesarean baby, born in Iran, where choosing a date like February fourteenth meant nothing. He told her about being in elementary school and being tormented by all the teasing, all the Cupid and therefore fairy and therefore fag jokes, and not being able to pour some water over their flames until junior high, when his Sam just snapped, Why the hell don’t you just make it February thirteenth, you ass? He told her it was because it was not true. She had rolled her eyes and snapped, Shit, X, who the hell is going to tell on you? God? He realized she had a point—although he was worried about documentation and official lies even at that age—and so as far as he could go with it, he went with February 13. It wasn’t until college and the era of social security numbers and memberships and registrars’ offices that he knew he would have to own up. Luckily, by then his world had grown up with him and nobody thought fag anymore when he muttered “Oh, two-fourteen.” They just thought, at most, at worst, cute.
So Suzanne understood Xerxes enough to know just to celebrate the birthday part. He would not humor pink wrapping, Cupid cards, candy hearts. It would just have to be another birthday. In a way, it relieved her. They still felt like a new couple and she didn’t want to do the wrong overly/insufficiently romantic thing—or expect him to do the right one and then be disappointed. It took everything off the hook. When friends asked what she and her mysterious invisible boyfriend—since they never ever saw him—were doing for Valentine’s Day, she was able to say, We’re celebrating my boyfriend’s birthday. Every time they would gasp, No really? Believe it, she would say, proudly.
There was not a more inappropriate day for Xerxes Adam to have been born on. There was not a more inappropriate day for Darius and Lala Adam to have had their Xerxes Adam. But the day means nothing to the Iranians, they would throw back to the amused Americans.
Suzanne barely had to scheme. When it came to her, the right, obvious, and only gift—the one that she had admittedly dreamed of for him since early on in their relationship, when she’d press him more about his past, want his parents’ stories, their parents’ stories, tidbits of whatever memory, no matter how ugly or apocalyptic the refuse in his brain—she was astounded at how easy it all was. It wasn’t cheap, but The Account’s girth plus the fact t
hat this boyfriend felt like an investment made it more than okay.
When she called her family’s usual travel agent and said the name of the destination, Lo of TixTrix made a sound somewhere in between a choke and a laugh. “Are you kidding, Suze?”
“Not at all. We can go there, right? There’s no, like, air ban or whatever?”
“Uh, no. Not that I know of, not today. But, Suze, I mean, they’re worried about Americans in Italy right now. And you want …” It was the first request for that country that Lo had gotten in years, maybe a decade, maybe ever?
“Two tickets, please.” Suzanne insisted. She wanted it done as quickly as possible.
“Oh brother.”
“And don’t tell Al,” she suddenly remembered. “Please. My dad won’t get it—I mean, I’ll let him know, but I have to be the one to do it.”
“Okay, yes, I don’t think I’d have the heart to spill any beans on this one. Geez.”
“Can we leave the dates open-ended?”
“Suzanne, are you sure? I mean, no, you can’t. You have to pick a departure date, but I mean, I can switch it for you later. But …”
“Great, fine, what day of the month is March … say, twentieth? Never mind what day, we’ll switch if we have to.”
“How about I put a hold and you think about it overnight?”
“Are you ready for my card number?” There was no time for holds in a decision like this. When she hung up the phone she was amazed at how calm she felt. How right it felt—this crazy, crazy thing that she had done. A part of her wondered if Xerxes would be mad. He certainly wasn’t impulsive. He couldn’t even leave a city that he hated, that he had been jobless in for over a year now, much less leave the country. He had never done that. He had never even talked about vacations. But even if he didn’t get it at first, he would later, she told herself. If that almost-half part of her was filled with such delight, such enthusiasm, spilling over to that just-over-half part of her that should have been nay-saying like Lo and any sensible American, then Xerxes would have to be into it, too. And that was what partners were for anyway, to bring out the best in each other—to show them a best existed. After all, he had no one—he acted parentless and she knew that she alone wasn’t enough, not even a damn halfie, she couldn’t bring it to him with her person, so she’d have to bring him to it. It was a big bang all right—it was the gift she always wished money could buy: a ticket to change your life.
Sons and Other Flammable Objects Page 24