Sons and Other Flammable Objects

by Porochista Khakpour

  And indeed it was magical, she thought, as she stared out into all the lack of space with her head at the eye level of all the other tall buildings, feeling herself halfway suspended into the heavens, towering over all the minor details, the human concerns, the little worries tucked temporarily in cabs, the same obnoxious eternally honking cabs of city comedies, guided by light after endless light, creating the loud neon buzz of the city, brighter than the sky, that barely open sky, that poked and prodded apparently island sky, still littered with more planes than she had ever seen before. She couldn’t even fear their sight.

  Of all feelings, she did not expect peace to be the one she would feel most wholly upon her arrival. But there it was. Everything else felt so distant—Darius, Xerxes, and, she hated to say it, her brother. Oh, she would try to find him of course—there was no stopping that—but she would not make it the end-all. She would instead take walks—real, invigorating, life-affirming walks, not those depressive time-killing walks at Arcadia Drive—she would go places at night, anywhere she wanted, she would talk to people, she would do all the things she never did in their new land, or in their home-land, in fact. She would for once embrace feeling alive. She would let go, she would for at least a week break from all the hurt, she would forget and for the first time find herself, her freedom. There would be insecurities, dark clouds, old goals, but like her brother-hunt, it was all hopeless, wasn’t it? Never did she think, of all things, hopelessness—the freedom from hope’s easily evaporating promises and suicidally rigid routings—could translate to the purest peace.

  When their plane landed, a little after noon, several of the passengers—those who had been on the previous emergency-landed flight—clapped. They were applauding what was to be expected, Xerxes thought bitterly: a normal flight, a normal landing, as if normalcy wasn’t deserved enough after you were about to find yourself trapped for many hours in an abnormal place like Germany. Frankfurt—for some reason, just the thought of it made him want to get out immediately. But not necessarily get out and get into Tehran. He was shaken up. He did not know if his fear had done it or if it had been the world, or, or hell, just a fucking loose bird directed awry into an engine, or—but he was, of course, worried that it was a sign.

  What the hell are the odds of an emergency landing when you’re already about to take the scariest plane ride of your life? Xerxes thought over and over. Is that supposed to be some extra kicker to soften the final blow? Distract me? Tell me that no matter what I’m dreading, it won’t be so bad, not in comparison with, say, your plane crashing and you dying, which you almost did?

  He knew he had to call Suzanne. And he was dreading it. Calling Suzanne, announcing his existence, would mean he was more than halfway there, on to Chapter 2, on to the new dread, on to the next big outcome-unknown thing. … He wished he had a second to think about the flight. Or, more importantly, to think about what he had thought about during his flight. He had, after all, thought about his father the entire time. At the moment of total loss, he had wished it had been his father and not him—because his father deserved it—not just any it, like simple generic death, but that particular end. He had tried to choose an end for his father, an end that had tried to choose him instead. It made him shudder.

  Once when he was a young child, his father had told him about a documentary he had seen on PBS about monkeys. Xerxes knew his father was no fan of monkeys so he expected it to be a good or funny anecdote at least. It was not. It was about a mother and a child monkey and in this experiment they had them in a bathtub-like thing, Darius had explained. Except it was like a hot plate. The scientists warmed the tub up, with the mother and her little child just standing there in it. Soon it got real hot, too hot. The two monkeys began to dance around a bit, jumping, screaming. They had no way of getting out, nothing to climb to, nothing to swing on and out. So you know what the clearly smarter mother did to get out of having her feet scorched? She rode on her child’s shoulders. The child monkey suffered serious burns on its feet by the time the scientists turned off the heating device. But the mother was fine. The mother was fine and unbothered. The child, afterward and through its healing process, seemed fine, too. They went on together as if nothing had ever happened, putting that little experiment and what it had brought out in them behind them, would you believe. …

  Xerxes suddenly knew the real ending of that experiment, the ending he’d really believe in, which his father had not gotten into, which the scientists hadn’t discovered yet. One day, later in the parent monkey’s old age, Xerxes thought, the child monkey, now an adult, would find another burning ground and have his chance to ride on his old mother’s shoulders. Except his sheer weight and overdeveloped hard adult anguish might kill his elderly mother monkey whereas he, the child, had healed. Somewhat. This was what growing up was: dealing with each other, finding the right deserved ways to deal with each other within the world’s cruel and unusual experiments, he dreamed, he justified.

  He turned the lights off on his thoughts—he had big important things to do, like call Suzanne, he reminded himself as he stood with his carry-on in the hallway of the arrival terminal. He turned on his cell phone and realized his phone didn’t work. Rats. He hadn’t considered that. Suzanne had international calling and he did not—his phone would be worthless the entire time. He looked around—phone book: check; gift store: check. He went into the store and bought a calling card and went back to the phone booth and eventually figured out how to dial.

  Mostly he hoped she wouldn’t answer and a little bit he hoped that she would.

  But when she answered, Xerxes immediately noticed she sounded markedly different from when they last spoke, when she had been on her lone way to the airport and he had been across the street secretly, drunkenly, remorselessly, watching her. No, this time it was Suzanne who sounded drunk.

  “Who’s this?” she asked.

  “Hi, Suzanne,” Xerxes said. “It’s me, Xerxes. It’s a phone card. I’m here.”

  “Xerxes! Welcome to Deutschland!!!” she gushed, full of giggles.

  “Hi. Well, I take it you got my message. It was so crazy, Su, this whole emergency landing—I really for a second thought it was all over—”

  “Oh, we knew you’d be fine!!” she continued to giggle.

  “No, really, Su, it was terrible. I mean, people were freaking out, even the flight attendants, and then there were paramedics on the ground and by the time we got on the next plane, well, I think we had all just lost our will to—”

  “We’re waiting for you, Xerxes! You should be telling all this to us in person! We have plenty of time, my dear!” Laughter, more laughter, all in her new weird giddiness.

  He suddenly froze. Her words sank in. We. She had been saying “we.”

  “Uh, Suzanne, when you say ‘we’…are you not alone?” He knew the answer, of course.

  “Silly, as you know, as arranged,…” she began sounding more serious, then paused, and then again broke into a laughing fit, howling, “I’m with Dad!”

  Xerxes felt every muscle in his body tense up. We. And now Dad?!

  “Dad?!” he shouted. “Did you say—did I hear—did you just call him—”

  More laughter. He could hear another voice, certainly his father, in the background laughing along. She continued, “Oh, sorry, Xerxes, that must have sounded sooooo inappropriate!! But that’s been our joke for hours … he keeps telling me to call him ‘Dad’!”

  Xerxes bit his lip to prevent the obvious obscenities from pouring out. He was beyond disgusted. He was sure he was getting a migraine.

  “Why does he say that?” Xerxes muttered slowly, then snapping, “Why something so stupid?”

  Suzanne paused in her cloud-puff delirium, not wanting to let the conversation escalate into anything that would jeopardize her ideal circumstances, the calm and peace and joy that she had suddenly been injected with since she had gotten to know Mr. Adam. She began to address the issue: getting Xerxes to them. She described the
restaurant they were in. “It’s a family-type place, big, bright, kids, moms, and. …”

  Dads. Dad, he thought. He could not believe it. She was his, too, now. How could he have ever thought otherwise? How could he have believed her nervousness yesterday about being stuck with his father alone? Of course they would be like his. Oh, she was his, just like the plan, the whole fucking vacation, was his at root.

  It had always been my dream that my child and I would one day return to Iran, Xerxes imagined his father had said dozens, if not hundreds, of times when he was a child, and now there they were, his son and his son’s girlfriend, both his children, apparently—as if he was God! Fuck!—suddenly stuck in his dream, suddenly left there to act out as characters in his oldest, most impossible dream.

  “Yes, I’ll be there in a … a bit,” Xerxes said. “I’m sure I’ll have no trouble finding you, don’t worry. I just need to use the restroom first and … and then I’ll see you … you two.”

  “Lovely!!” she cooed again. She sounded breathless. What had she become? What had he done to her? He could not wait for the conversation to end so he cut in with a quick, curt “Bye” and hung up before he could hear another ecstatic breath.

  He indeed had to go to the bathroom. Not to go, but he needed a place to sit, one that was not in plain view, that offered no visual distractions, that ensured he would not be spotted, where he could be left unbothered no matter how long he was there. Where he could consider his options.

  He found one. He went in and shut the stall door behind him and sat in his pants on the toilet seat, perching his elbows on his knees and dropping his face into his hands. Every second or so, there was a chorus of chiming flushes, sometimes a ruder sound, sometimes a sigh, a cough, a snippet of conversation. Xerxes had so many troubles shouting through the chambers of his brain that the noise wasn’t chipping into his attention much. He was worried, he was confused, he was angry, he was scared. It all had to do with him. Darius, now intensified by the presence of Her. How had he been so stupid to allow their meeting to just happen so slickly? Oh, he had believed in Suzanne’s qualms, in Darius’s misanthropic manners—he never in a million years thought there they would be, discovering some universe together, happy together, just waiting for the Xerxes-pin to pop their downright enchanted universe of bubbles. Dad. She had called his dad—a man he himself didn’t even call Dad, a man he himself didn’t call—Dad. This was the problem with Suzanne—like the trip to Iran, she was always able to go too far. And here she was innocently, accidentally even, doing it again. He felt his old anger about the whole situation build up again—suddenly he could see his hand, hot and hard, confident and crass, flat against her face, his own palm burning from that forbidden impact. Against that image he saw his own father running to her side, holding her injured, tear-streaked face, telling her it was all right, to ignore Xerxes—and she whispering, Thanks, Dad. They would maybe do just that—ignore him—in the airport, in the airplane, in the streets of Iran. This brought him to another problem: Darius would likely be by their side the entire time. There he would be, appearing like the world’s greatest man—the father Xerxes saw as a young child, before his teen years tinted his vision more darkly and thus accurately—not letting himself unravel fully for her. Or maybe he would, like a snake, slowly shed so she could eventually see all the darkness—maybe he would show her everything. Under a sparkling night sky, he would direct her face up to the stars, pointing, and say, Do you know, when I was a boy, such was my world: would you believe, we could make those in a hot second. … Maybe he would tell her everything, in a different way from what Xerxes had recounted to her—maybe she would sigh, smile, find it magical, poignant. Maybe then, once in Iran, he would really show her everything: the blood, the incarceration, the hurt in the eyes of a culture, the baby hands on prison bars, the secret hushed hisses of women, the agonized prayer-cries of mortal men, everyone, not just the women, veiled in a deep unshakable blackness. … Welcome to our world, he might say, welcome to Iran, and maybe she would never want to leave. This created your boyfriend, Darius would tell her. And I created this. For his generation. This is his. I come from some place before this. You wouldn’t recognize. But we, we did this to us. We took our old Iran and turned it into this world. I made your boyfriend a world that he couldn’t live in, but yet, look, he’s here, he’s living in it again. … Maybe she would actually think, It’s not so bad. They don’t understand. Maybe she would even say, No, Xerxes doesn’t understand. …

  The floor was getting hot and there he was, Dad, with his hands on Xerxes’s shoulders, about to get on top of him. Xerxes could feel himself about to get burned.

  He had to leave. It had been a while, he knew that. He got out of the stall and washed his hands for no reason. He was suddenly very alone—the bathroom appeared empty. He looked long and hard into the mirror. He was amazed to see that the cliché still stood—in spite of everyone always saying it would go away in the postteen years, go away with the acne and the SATs and the word “underage”—there they were: The Questions. The who the hell am I? The what am I doing? They were always there, always existed, they applied on all micro and all macro levels. He was as lost in the moment as he was lost in life.

  He didn’t want to leave the bathroom. Suddenly the limbo of Frankfurt appealed to him. In an alternate universe he was not just the missing boyfriend, he was simply missing—in two countries, two groups of countrymen were minus him, two countries far far away from each other, as different from each other as they were alike, both Xerxes-free. He was back to that feeling of not wanting to exist, wanting to let himself dissolve to something void of that ugly word identity, where the bloodless like him could disintegrate gracefully. Was it Germany? This big international hub in Germany? He thought, Of all places! Of all places that have quite a take or two in their histories on the issue of identity …

  But as he walked out—the echo of the dirty white halls, the taps of heels on the ground, the German announcements cutting in back and forth, the blinking screens, and the other lost people—it felt right. Where else did he have to go?

  The answer was in front of him: “WIRTSHAUS” said the neon sign, and “Pub” next to it. Perfect, he thought, there was a good sign, for once, a good omen. What he needed was a drink—things worked out much better when he was drinking, he decided.

  He gave his face a few good wipes, tried to plaster on a smile even, and walked in. Before he could turn to the pretty young bartender and declare “Scotch on the rocks,” he paused, distracted by something on the plasma TV screen. It was a show—in Germany unlike the United States, he gathered, sports were not the only pub-viewing fare—a show he knew too well. Holy shit. There she was, sign of signs, beautiful, beaming, and blonde, every inch of her—smile, words, aura, everything—bright as hell. Jeannie.

  She was arguing with her mirror image, a twin, and quite heatedly, hands on hips, then hands in the air, ponytail shaking with fury, face in scowl, face in bitter mocking laughter. Her words were in German but there were subtitles in English. Before he could digest the twin premise, she was suddenly alone in the genie’s bottle—the words underneath memo-ing her dilemma for him: “All I do is think and blink.”

  What were the odds? he thought.

  The bartender came up to him and said something. He pried his eyes from the screen and just pointed upward.

  She nodded, laughing.

  “What were the odds?!” he exclaimed, not sure she would understand the English.

  “Ha, yes, yes!” she laughed some more. He was still not sure if she had understood his English.

  For a moment, he just stood there, his whole body cold and quaking. He had the chills.

  Soon enough something told him to keep moving, whatever you do, keep moving—before he was too deep into the situation, before he let himself get all stuck in the bottle, the Scotches and rocks and Jeannies and thinking/blinking, he decided to shatter the sign. Omen or whatever, he was out of there. With a quick wave,
he literally ran out, sure he could still hear the bartender-girl laughing over the strange German voice of his old Jeannie. …

  Eventually they ran out of small talk and he felt he had to tell her stories. Not just to keep her there—she wasn’t going anywhere—but to keep her with him. To keep her charmed, allied with Dad. Any second his son could come and who knew what could happen to the dynamic? He would do his best, but how could he guarantee Xerxes would do his best? He had to earn her understanding.

  Also, they were drinking and this encouraged stories. She had started ordering glass after glass of wein, and soon some untapped locks in his brain were coming undone.

  So he told her the story he had never told him. It was the story he had asked for, the one he had mistakenly replaced with the other. He told her the story of that twelfth summer of Xerxes’s, when Darius’s one mission in life was to save the neighborhood blue jay population by putting bell collars on all the neighborhood cats.

  “Gorbay, is that how you say it?” Suzanne was practicing.

  “Gorbeh,” he corrected. “You need more -EH.”

  “Wow, you saved some little lives there!” she smiled.

  “Can you believe that neighbor, she said the eff-word in front of him and everything?!” he laughed, adding more quietly, “Yes, I did save a few things in my life.”

  “Castro! What a name for a cat! I can’t believe you remember!” Suzanne laughed back. “Another glass?”

  “What do you call it—the underdog—I like to help underdogs,” he went on. His face was getting red. He was not sure if drinking was a good thing with this girl. He hadn’t drunk like this in ages. “No. No more drinks.”

  Instead, more stories. He recollected when they went to Disneyland for the first time and how Xerxes hated it—he was scared of all the real-life-sized suddenly alive Mickeys and Goofys and Donalds and Plutos, confused at their extra-animation corporeal existence—