Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  There he was—the man Lala had described—and there he wasn’t. Marvin waved impotently as the cab sped off. He sat there for a moment, on the Eden curb, contemplating what they all meant, that odd Odd-damn family, before he got into his SUV and went on with his life.

  In spite of his hypothesis, the Scotches on rocks were not helping. He in fact felt sicker than ever. Butterflies in stomachs were one thing, but Xerxes Adam felt as if his entire gastrointestinal universe were infested by rats—they were gnawing and nibbling and regurgitating … it was too much. It was so much that when 1 p.m. rolled around—when he knew he was due just a few doors down, at his apartment, to gather bags, his girl, and that car service to JFK—he simply couldn’t. The bartender eyed him sadly as he ordered his sixth drink.

  “Please don’t let me have another,” Xerxes moaned miserably. “My wife … I have to meet my wife.” He was calling her his wife. He couldn’t believe it. The bartender was nodding, trying to juggle him against the animated booze-for-lunch crowd.

  He finally made it to good judgment and closed his tab and was spending a long while just contemplating the bill when his cell phone rang.

  The inevitable: “Uh, Xerxes. …” It was Suzanne, of course, sounding alarmed and annoyed, of course. “What’s going on? I’ve been calling all morning. Is everything okay? The car service is coming any second … where are you?”

  Xerxes tried to chuckle—he was going for a chuckle that would sound soothing and pleasant, a no worries kind of chuckle, but instead he feared it came out sleazy, irresponsible, drunken. He feared the chuckle’s accuracy.

  “Oh, Suzanne, Suzanne, Suzanne!” he stalled. He hot-wired his brain to emergency mode. “You see, I got out just recently—I’m sick indeed—nothing major, but bad enough—an infection—a mild one though—must get medicine. That’s where I am now. Getting medicine. Pharmacy. Midtown. The Midtown Pharmacy. Waiting for the medicine. It’s an obscure one—it might take a while longer—not too long—but you know. …”

  Suzanne was silent for a moment. “Xerxes, are you too sick? What is it? You were at the doctor’s for, like, four hours?”

  “Well, yes,” he chuckled again. “Got there—it took some time for him to see me—so last-minute, you know, the appointment—oh, the doctor says ‘hi’ to your dad—anyway, it took some time and then there were all the tests—blood tests, cancer tests, and whatnot—it took a while. Then I went to a couple of drug stores for this drug—hard to find—but they have it—once I take it, it will be fine.”

  Silence.

  He added, “I’m coming. You know, I swear, I’m coming! I mean, we’re going. Yes! All is well!”

  Suzanne again paused. “Xerxes, you sound really strange. Look, we’re going to miss our plane. And I’m worried about you. What can I do?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “Nothing, nothing. No, you’re right—shit—the plane. Su … you know, you should … you should take it!” His brain was fixing the unfixable. Genius, he thought.

  “Take what?” she said, sounding suddenly as though she was approaching patience deficiency.

  “The plane! I’ll be … I’ll take the next one.” He couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. It was almost as if he was trying to get—Oh, it was brilliant, his head told him. It was the best idea he’d had in a while.

  Suzanne sighed. He didn’t sound right. Not even sick, just crazy. She didn’t know what to make of it.

  Meanwhile, the car service was buzzing her door. “The car’s here, Xerxes. I’ll cancel it. I’ll cancel it now.”

  “No!” he shouted. “You listen to me—there is definitely a later flight—I will get it—probably with the long stopover in Frankfurt we can still take the Tehran flight together. It’ll all work out … somehow. …” His own words shocked him. In the airbrushed universe of alcoholic buzz, he apparently had some solutions. That slight possibility of being right, having a way to make the mess work for once, was filling him with energy, the superhuman mania that could make emergency-struck men suddenly lift cars and bend steel. …

  Before he knew it, she was in tears. Nope, called that too soon, back to nothing working out. Once again, he was making her cry. He wondered if he should just pay up and run over to her, then and there, pretend he had hopped into a speeding cab and made it. But he couldn’t. He simply couldn’t imagine seeing her, then getting into a plane and zooming off. Not in the state he was in. It could only make things worse. Plus, now he did feel sick. He finally felt really sick. The rats—he felt his stomach lining corroding—he was maybe even dying—yes, he had to be sure he wasn’t dying first.

  By some miracle, Suzanne finally agreed to take the cab—her exact words “Oh God, who the fuck cares at this point!”—and carried their conversation out onto the curb.

  Phone to his ear, Xerxes ran to the bar door, where, through a little dirty diamond-shaped peephole of a window, he could see his girlfriend just a diagonal block away, struggling with two large bags.

  “Oh, you didn’t have to take mine!” he accidentally said.

  “Your what?” she snapped. “I’m taking your bags, if that’s what you mean. Wait, wha …?”

  “I know you!” he tried to laugh it off. “I knew you would!”

  She was silent again. Once in the cab, she said, “I hate this. I want you to know I hate this.”

  “I understand,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. He added a chuckle that was meant to be consoling.

  “If you do, then why, oh why, are you so amused? Why are you laughing at this, Xerxes?”

  He was silent. He had no more ideas.

  “I’m calling my travel agent now to find out the next flight,” she went on. “If what you suggest can actually work, okay. If it doesn’t work, I’m coming back in this cab. But listen, if I go on that flight and land in Frankfurt and you never show up, Xerxes, I’m coming back. But not to you. It will be so over.”

  It was the first time she had ever made such a threat. In spite of its being quite fair, considering, it still pissed him off.

  “Please, I’m sick, I don’t need that,” he snapped.

  When they finally got off the phone, Xerxes suddenly felt washed in a disappointing wave of sobriety. What did I just do? he thought. He put down his money and thanked the bartender and got up. It was harder to walk than he imagined—aspirations toward sobriety were perhaps jumping the gun. Outside, the sunlight was piercing and terrible. But he couldn’t wait to get to his apartment—his Suzanne-less, luggage-less apartment, his apartment before her and all the crazy plans.

  But before he even got inside his door, there she was, calling again.

  “There’s a 9:30 p.m. flight, whole different airline, different deal, that my agent got you on,” she said, still snapping and stony. “You’ll only be five hours behind. You get in at 10:40 a.m. and then we can take the 2:55 p.m. to Tehran. It’s the only way it will work. I’m actually amazed it can work.”

  “Great!” he said. It would give him enough time to really sober up, sober up and think, set his brain and stomach right again, get ready, and be off.

  She gave him the flight details. “So be ready by six at the latest—I called you a car, too. Anyway, I guess I’ll just be there waiting by myself in Frankfurt for hours … oh, your dad will get in, he said, around ten. So, we can have a little awkward time together before you get there, just me and your dad!” she sounded bitter yet restrained, as if she was holding back some serious fury.

  His silence was heavy. It made her reevaluate her tone. “Yeah, um, he called again,” she said sheepishly. “Wanted to confirm the times. …”

  His dad. He had forgotten about that part. What a disaster. He didn’t even address it, and consoled himself by thinking that without him how the hell would she find Darius anyway? It was better that she didn’t. They could both just not find him until they absolutely had to. The idea of cutting down their dad-time—maybe never finding him at all, thanks to his delay—was a huge bonus, he thought.
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br />   “Okay, everything is fine!” he heard himself chuckle again to her. But she was already gone and all he had was static on his cell. He decided he had earned this time—a spare-time reward for cowardice and delinquency and deception—to enjoy his perfectly neat, perfectly comfortable, perfectly his, New York apartment for a last few hours—not last few, as in last few, as in never again, no, surely it wasn’t so bad, I’m not going to meet my death, it’s a vacation, a vacation for me and my girl, and, er, my father, who we can dodge anyway, everything is fine, see, see, see—to take in and then abandon, like everything else. Leaving, escaping, exiling, always running off and away—it was natural. It was in his blood, after all, he thought, chuckling still.

  It was unusually bright outside, she thought, as her plane took off. Lala didn’t remember it like this—well, not on that flight, twenty-something years ago, her one plane flight, from Iran to America—she didn’t recall all that sunniness illuminating the thing’s insides like that. It made her worry that all the light was actually from something burning. If she tried, she could smell it—something intense, chemical, plastic, worrisome. And the sounds, she hadn’t remembered the sounds—the purring, the roaring, the screeches—just like a car, but worse. Like a cross between a big rig and a dragon—a monstrous thing whose mechanisms were altogether above their heads. She realized she had never had to pick if she was a plane-person or not, but now she knew she wasn’t. The whole thing was making her ill.

  Next to her sat a businessman—not a very fancy one, she decided, as there he was in her economy section, drinking Coke, with his tie untied. Every time she’d jump, startled by some unanticipated shake, rattle, or roll, she’d look to him, and either he’d ignore her or, once in a while, he’d look up and wink.

  What the hell does that wink mean? she thought. But it seemed to sum it all up, the entire experience—signals, signs, omens—nobody in a plane communicated, nobody explained things, people just sat there suspended, knocked out, or else with all selfhood sucked out of them for passengerdom’s sake, that belly of the beast just an accepted no-living zone. They could be their human selves, articu-lacy and reactions and all, once they were on the earth again. Here in the heavens they might as well be dead.

  Don’t say that don’t say that don’t say that! she scolded herself, shuddering. When the stewardess came around asking for drink orders, Lala paused, tried to plaster on a big charming smile, and asked, “Do you have anything that will … put me away?”

  “Put you away?!” said the white smile of the stewardess, her blue eyes swelling dumbly like over-flooded globes.

  “Put me, you know, away, off … out? Put me out, that’s it, right?”

  “Put you out!” the stewardess exclaimed, working the glossy putty of her face into an expression of exaggerated disapproval.

  “Sleep,” Lala said. “You know, like how everyone else is sleeping.”

  The stewardess laughed, again over-animatedly, so charmed indeed. “Oh, I think the sleeping ones may be taking something a bit more than a drink!” she laughed. “We don’t have sleeping pills or anything, ma’am, none that we issue. Can I get you … tea? Wine?”

  Lala shook her head, annoyed. Now that the stewardess had finally gotten it, Lala suddenly felt insulted. No, she didn’t necessarily mean sleeping pills—she just wanted advice, a chat, a nice word about everything being normal and right. “Never mind, I want nothing,” she mumbled.

  When the stewardess came back, she brought water anyway. Lala took it without thanking her, chugged it down, and tried to shut her eyes.

  It was even more annoying. Every time she tried to envision him—that grown Xerxes-looking brother of hers, say, in a tie, a tie and hat, smiling, maybe even a bit pleasantly plump, holding flowers for her, flowers and a hug—he would evaporate, evaporate and become. …

  Darius. Big lanky Darius in a worn, cheap dress shirt and supermarket flip-flops, with his arms folded across his chest—a combined gesture of fiery agitation and icy condescension—Darius with his mouth open and going on and on, fists clenching and unclenching, arms throwing themselves in the air, hands running through his nearly extinct patches of shocked white hair—Darius pacing, Darius cursing, Darius demanding … it was all she got. Her husband; no brother. The plane; no New York. There was still no peace; she was still thousands of miles from the proposed peace.

  Many hours into the flight, as the plane began its slow descent, she began to drift off—just as the cluster of skyscrapers began to appear out from under the clouds and passengers began to point and crane their necks for that perfect sunny midday panoramic view—and with shut eyes, she began to see again. But this time it wasn’t him—nor him, not even her brother actually—it was just herself, herself in a black dress, juggling bagel-coffee-cigarette, hair done, sunglassed, all fancy and young and stupid, with her gloved hands pressed up against the glass of a big uptown jeweler that was of course the one, where she was pausing dreamily, sighing, leaning under the Tiffany’s sign contentedly, as if it were her only home, perfect, hope-filled, and promising—until the tires hit the runway and she was jolted back hard to an appropriately breakneck, perfectly startling conclusion.

  It had been well over two decades since Darius Adam had flown. In the plane it felt just like being home again: the grand rumble of the engines, the strange hiss of overhead air, the pilot’s deal-sealing greeting, the pretty stewardesses, the free juice … it was great. He was so grateful for the ten hours in which he had nothing to do but not exist. Exit Darius. Fade out. Do nothing. Do not even do nothing. Just nothing. No thoughts even. Or say you wanted to think a thing or two—poof, it wouldn’t count on land! He remembered having lusty stewardess fantasies on that ride to America and devising that theory then and there—it didn’t matter in the heavens, only thoughts on earth did. Once on the ground, he would have to push those fantasies out. But in the plane, hell, Darius thought, there might even be an argument for pushing that foxy stewardess into a bathroom and getting away with it.

  On this flight, it wasn’t the stewardesses who were providing the forbidden thoughts. It wasn’t even that strange black man and his wife, who were popping up in the paranoiac chambers of the anxiety department within his brain. It was just his son, his son, his one and only son, whom he could suddenly talk to and tell over and over—free in the space of his head, free in the space of the heavens, so far from the real dramas of the earth—Son, I love you, over and over …

  Something went wrong.

  But before that inevitable something took its wrong turn, Xerxes actually made it—against all odds, even though barely getting out of the fog of a hazy hangover by 6 p.m., Xerxes Adam made it to the airport. He arrived early even. He had sat in the terminal mostly calm—the remnants of the hangover taking the edge off of everything, sapping him of any complicated thoughts, of which there would have otherwise been many. He had reveled in the luxury of excess time by eating pretzels and drinking vitamin-infused water and watching as the clock neared the 9:30 takeoff. He was glad it would be night—he had no interest in really realizing he was leaving the continent. He didn’t want to see all that water or the new foreign landmasses that would undoubtedly look different—they would have a different expanse from theirs, Mars-like, more unfamiliarly hued, more bodies of water he couldn’t name, another mountain range to remind him of the consistently cumbersome nature of the earth’s foundation. He would sleep, he decided. He would sit back, sleep, and in the morning deal with the reality of what he had actually done in agreeing to this nightmare.

  But as life often went for Xerxes Adam, something had to go wrong. Only minutes after he had taken his seat—luckily next to an old couple, probably German, German-looking at least, who upon sitting looked instantly passed out—and the stewardesses had tucked everyone in and the pilot had announced the flight time of seven hours and thirty minutes—just minutes after the plane had taken off into the dark clear New York night, they all saw that something was wrong.

 
Namely, in the form of a flash of gold and an apparently consequential rumble or two.

  The problem was that with the very nebulous operating nature of planes, with their inner workings mostly a mystery to their generally ignorant patrons, who knew what to make of it? With their usual weird night-lights and such who could tell if it was an abnormality? Xerxes saw the flash; everyone else saw the flash, too. But certainly owing to the strange etiquette codes, behavioral requirements, and silently enforced social standards especially post-9/11, no one allowed himself to blink an eye. The ones with their eyes closed kept them closed. The ones engrossed in their magazines stayed engrossed. The ones zoning out into space stayed zoned. So Xerxes closed his eyes, pushed his seat back a bit, and tried to forget it, too.

  He was trying to shove himself into the cusp of sleep when the pilot cut in with his garbled static-ridden message. It was clear something was wrong. It was not the usual monotone of pilots, though it was not hysteria either—it was just a deep gravity that meant business. The only words Xerxes really caught were “bird” and “engine.” Which were enough. Soon, throughout the cabin everyone was whispering—and why people whisper in planes, who knows, Xerxes thought, especially now!—and the flight attendants, too were scurrying around like those battery-operated robot toys that bump into walls and redirect themselves over and over and over. The stewardesses were well-meaning, wanting to be there for them, be there and there and everywhere, but how could they or anyone in a situation like that …?

  A bird had blown out an engine, the story went. How fucking perfect, Xerxes Adam thought, of all fucking ends, this ending. …

  His mind was struggling to slow down the chaos of thoughts coming sheet after sheet, slicing and dicing their way through his brain to his core, head to heart—the heart, the graveyard of all the truest, toughest thoughts. He thought hard and fast, as perhaps it was the last dance of the thinking device: Now planes can fly on one engine, people say that, it’s true—but there’s a worst part here and it’s not mechanics—bird, engine, fire, what does that remind you of—don’t pretend like it’s an enigma, asshole—birds like stars burning out in the night—oh, look what your fear has done, Xerxes—fuck, it’s me, perfect ending—but you have the wrong Adam, wrong Adam, this is my father’s fate, not mine—the bastard, where is he, here by now, there while I am about to be nowhere—oh, nowhere land, here I come, here I don’t come—this is how it had to end, with this group of people, under the rules of my father’s fate—and me, a Middle Eastern man dying in a plane crash, oh, what would they think—surely I am guilty, I mean, surely they would think I am the one, I am the guilty—Suzanne, Father, Mother, wherever you are, are you happy, are you happy—did I, I did, I did this to you, look, look, look what my fear has done. …