Sons and Other Flammable Objects Page 2

  At the door was a woman: short, white, draped in black, tangled hair. She was a more recent tenant, Xerxes thought. She was holding a black cat under her armpit, clutching it like a handbag. In her other hand was a bell collar.

  “So, hi, yeah, I’m in number six and, really, I don’t want to waste any time here, folks,” she blurted out in one speedy breath, before Xerxes’s parents could even think of saying Hello, or more likely, What do you want? “See, for many days now, off and on, I keep finding these bell-thingies on my cat. I take them off, throw ’em out, and they come back on. Interesting, no?”

  Xerxes rejoiced at the very matter-of-fact way his father nodded. This would get good, he thought.

  “Yes, well, Castro is my cat,” she said, suddenly speaking more slowly, perhaps picking up that they were foreign, Xerxes assumed, as usual, whenever any American seemed artificially polite, slow, or simple around them. “Mine. I don’t like having strangers put things on my cat. I find that screwy. I would have said something sooner, but I couldn’t figure out who had done it. And then I talked to another cat owner here in Eden, who had the same thing happen to her. And she had spoken to another family that had had the same thing happen to them. Eventually, we found an owner who claimed to have seen you take the cats into your home. So … we have a few requests. …” Still clutching Castro as hard as ever, she dropped the collar and produced a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket.

  Xerxes’s father looked back helplessly at his wife and son.

  Wife and son both stayed seated on their respective couches, pretending to be absorbed by the TV commercials, feigning that they couldn’t hear a word at the door, that it was none of their business anyway, that it was not their fault, they were not involved, that they were deaf, dumb, brain-dead, plastic. They just happened to live with the bad guy.

  She cleared her throat and read her statement: “So. Our first request is to know why, just the basic reason—that’s A. Our second request, B, is to know why we were not involved in your little mission. C, we need to know when and how and what was used to get the cats into your home. D, we need to know if you plan on stopping this now. E, what are you thinking, what’s your fucking problem, what’s your fucking name even?”

  Dang, thought Xerxes, double dang. It was hard for him to pretend not to have heard that final, certainly improvised, incredibly effective arsenal-morsel. What Mrs. Cook, his last elementary school teacher, had once referred to as the “effin word” had suddenly surfaced naked, loud, and toxic in all its verboten glory, like a defecating bogeyman, perfectly and shockingly used by, of all people, an adult, an adult stranger, over, of all things, his father’s mission to put bells on a bunch of annoying, bird-hungry cats. Xerxes was thrilled. He watched his mother’s eyes close, felt the clench in her jaw, the deep breathing, he could almost hear the ghost of her mind control tapes bellowing, I am an endless warm beach in the evening, troubles like waves brush against me and phoooooshhhhhh. … She was mortified. It was possible, Xerxes thought, that his mother, having never been on an American playground, having watched few movies—and the few being Disney as far as he knew—had never even heard the word uttered out loud. For a moment he felt ashamed, recalling the boldness of his early youth, when at age eight or so—the age when he first heard it—he decided to present it to his mother at home, craftily phrasing it to her like, So mother is the eff-you-see-kay-word pronounced fee-ook? He was, of course, aiming for absolute innocence, as if hoping his naïveté would be curtly rewarded with a short lesson in why not to say that word, the frosting on top being possibly trapping his mother into having to properly pronounce it. She had instead said, I do not know how, all I know is we do not say it, now get out, shut up, stop it. That was all.

  But now that he had heard it used so appropriately, he agreed that the word could really be a terrible word. Somehow it worked for comedy value when uttered by the fattest, dumbest, red-faced blond boys on the playground, was a word for the streetwise robber on late-night TV, a word that had magically escaped radio-bleeping on a rap song—but from this average, angry American woman, armed with an armpit full of feline, it was frightening.

  Xerxes closed his eyes. “There is a child in the house,” he could hear his father saying, “a child who does not know such words.” He could hear his father lying, “and I do not think the situation requires the use of that word.”

  “What does the situation require then? The police?!” the woman snapped, pissed off. “You’ve kidnapped our cats and wrung their necks with bell-thingies! The police maybe, huh?”

  Enter a long silence. Xerxes knew those, the ones that often came after a conflict, after the conflict’s climax in particular, often between his mother and father—the worst one having happened at one Saturday breakfast when Xerxes’s mother had hurled a croissant into his father’s face for reasons that were unknown to their son but apparently very clear to her husband who had retaliated by strangling an innocent stick of butter. The silence had been very long. Xerxes had even had the chance to time it, it was so long. (Exactly 197 seconds, his digital He-Man watch revealed.) He had learned then that the best thing to do during such silences was to simply cough. Simple formula: loud noise→loud noise crescendo→SILENCE→cough! maybe even cough! cough! When a student got chastised at school and the silence descended, Xerxes coughed. Often other students, a few, would follow his lead. It felt as if they had tapped into some social Band-Aid straight out of the pages of the tenets and anti-tenets of adulthood, the conversational rescue, the nonverbal reliever. Like padding a sentence with the soft fat of “um” and “like,” it just lubricated the austerity. Xerxes found it very useful and once when he used SILENCE with his mother, he was terrifically tickled, not to mention intellectually validated, by a quick cough-cough-cough! triplet from his father, who was staying out of it but supplying some rope.

  But he could not cough in this instance. He knew why: the danger with coughing was that it made your own presence known. There had to be the faith that the two or more players in the silence game were so engrossed in their static conflict that their concentration could not be broken by an outside accidental utterance. But here he was not sure. Who knew the degree to which the angry woman was invested in having just a showdown with Darius—she could be as likely to lash out at any target. No, they were all involved and to cough here would be suicide. His father would have to handle this.

  In his own way, he was handling it. “First of all, my name is Darius Adam,” he said slowly when he did finally speak, slowly but firmly, “and I did not do whatever you’re talking about and also I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It was brilliant—shocking, but brilliant. He swore he saw his mother’s face go from a clenched grimace to a sudden split-second ghost of the beginning of a grin, and then quickly back to clenched grimace.

  The woman, obviously reasonably intelligent, didn’t believe him. “Oh, okay. Right. You have no idea, no idea why something like this would be happening?”

  His father shook his head in a way that indicated understanding, empathy for the cause, and utter condescension—as if to say, What a crazy woman you are, asking me, someone who did not do whatever you’re talking about and also who doesn’t know what you are talking about, bothering me with questions. Okay, I will just humor you, how’s that?

  “I will say this,” Darius Adam offered, “If someone is doing it at all—for any reason—I would imagine it is because the person wants the cats to make a sound, yes? And a loud sound. Now why would someone do that?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “No. Just know there is a reason for everything. Ask yourself, if someone wants the cats to be noisy, why? What benefit? Cats are quiet, yes? And what do quiet cats do?” He paused dramatically and Xerxes knew that what would come next would be good—his father had that deeply contented half smile that promised that his brain had just concocted an effective verbal punch: “They kill. Kill well.”

  “Kill what?”r />
  Xerxes’s father took the opportunity to add a laugh, the hard laughter of adults that rarely expressed genuine humor, but rather cynicism, darkness, a sort of inner deadness. Somewhere deep inside, Darius Adam was ready to decapitate this woman.

  “Oh, let’s see … birds? Birds, maybe? Blue jays?”

  This time it was the woman’s turn to laugh. It was a witchy cat-lady sort of laugh. Even though his father was in the wrong in every way, it felt good for Xerxes to imagine the woman defeated.

  “So you’ve gone out, bought these ridiculous thingies, put them on everyone’s cats, so the birds can, like, get away?”

  “Someone has done that, I believe.”

  “That’s not the solution. To kidnap other people’s cats and force them into these stupid things to save … birds. Please! They don’t belong to anyone.”

  “You’re right,” said the man named after a mostly unconquerable Persian king, with a half smile. “They don’t belong to anyone. They belong to everyone.”

  The silence again. The woman looked disgusted; Darius looked triumphant.

  “I don’t want you touching my Castro or anyone else’s cat ever again,” she snapped. “I will call the police.”

  His father shook his head—additionally implying, Why do you think it’s me, so misled!—as he shut the door on her and her cat’s equally homicidal mugs, the way he had seen done on a million television situation comedies—a move she earned after her hostility, her profane language in front of his woman and child—and of course, the opportunity that came with it, the cherry on top of a grandslam banana split like that, was the word, a single word, that both Xerxes and his mother knew all too well, his favorite word, uttered when they had crossed some sacred line with him too weary to say more, when he reminded himself that he, Darius, was born for the last word of last words: “ENOUGH.”

  It was many years later, when father and son were together in Xerxes’s Manhattan studio, sitting in plastic chairs and drinking hot milk and eating dry Fruity Pebbles, that it all came back to Xerxes and he asked Darius, in a window of silence, simply, in total innocence, to talk about something that had been glossed over in the many humorous/atrocious anecdotes of his youth: his father and his mission with the endangered birds. …

  New York, 2000

  Hot milk?! Fruity Pebbles?! Darius couldn’t believe it but it would have to do. Xerxes had run out of tea, he lied to his father (since he never bought tea, ever), although he did have a cup’s worth of instant coffee (his father wouldn’t touch the stuff, he told him, especially the instant stuff), so his father, expecting his own constant dismay while in his son’s bare-bones new abode, finally dumped some milk in a pan, turned up the heat, and declared, like everything else, it will have to do. Outside it was freezing, after all, and Darius Adam would not deal with the East Coast chill without a warm inside especially since his son’s apartment was a goddamn igloo (The heat is on, I swear, argued Xerxes, to which his father snapped, Always a liar of convenience!) And as for food, Xerxes offered potato chips, which his father looked at as if he had never seen a Pringles can before, awestruck at his son’s supposedly adult living conditions. Xerxes offered to make some pasta (No sauce? asked his father—I prefer the other stuff … ketchup, said Xerxes) or perhaps some canned vegetarian chili? Finally, his father, after rummaging through his mostly empty cupboards, pulled out the only product he found several boxes of: Fruity Pebbles. His father sniffed at it, shook his head, sniffed again, shrugged, pulled out a bowl, and the two men passed the evening sipping at slightly sugared hot milk—oddly, nicer than they could have possibly imagined, they both thought independently, although it was making them lazy, slow, more bored than before—and dipping for fingerfuls of strange pastel-colored sugar-crusted cereal bits.

  “Strange indeed,” said his father after a while, after their usual too-long breaches of dialogue, in which chewing, swallowing, sipping, a stray radiator chime, and an occasional old-tactical-standby cough from Xerxes were the only sounds punctuating that depressing institution of silence in Xerxes’s apartment, “your life.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What were the places you lived in after college like? Certainly your roommates did not live like this?”

  “Worse.”

  “You like being alone like this?”

  “Yup.”

  “Awful.”

  “Whatever.”

  His son’s first apartment alone was nothing like what he had said it would be. Darius Adam remembered the first letter he got from his son that called the place spacious, almost one bedroom, high ceilings, wood floor, two windows, bath and shower, centrally located, only twelve hundred dollars a month! He had asked what the big deal was for a “wood floor” when they had wall-to-wall carpeting in the apartment he grew up in. Dad, everyone here wants hardwood! His father asked him how he vacuumed. He didn’t, he said. Oh. Twleve hundred dollars is a bargain then? Practically free. Oh.

  “I could not live like this, son. I just want you to know that.”

  Xerxes knew he wouldn’t understand—or would pretend not to, although he suspected that deep down inside his father envied it all. With his father it was always Opposite Day, his black-to-white contrarianism reminding Xerxes of the stuff of that wacky schoolhouse pseudo holiday: pants worn backward, fingers crossed behind backs, poker faces over untruths, et cetera. Kids loved that negation crap and so did his father, Xerxes had decided long ago. His “I could not live like this” probably translated roughly to I would do anything to switch places with you and not live with your degenerating menopausal mother in our suffocating cultureless California life, where there is no such thing as central location.

  They had come to the point where they were both men, Xerxes at twenty-five, a man finally, supposedly; and his father fifty-five, a man still, thankfully, not quite an old man yet. They would have only a few of these years in which they were of a shared demographic, both men realized, never commenting on it, even as they knew it was one of the few safe commonalities, other than their surnames and blood, that they could discuss without controversy. For some reason, this idea brought Xerxes to the point of tears a few times. He was aging, his father was aging. Soon all they would have would be their past, all conversations starting with “remember when”—the only future for him being his own old-man-hood and for his father … death. Shit. Life was actually short. Most times Xerxes felt grateful for that, but other times, like this, his father’s first trip to see him since he had moved out for college, he felt all the sadness of life’s midget proportions like the dull throb of a bad knee on a rainy day: we are all dying, we are all dying. …

  Maybe it was that sudden tenderness for the situation that had made him ask about it. It was the first time he had remembered the birds again, somehow for Xerxes one of the most moving memories of his youth, one of the only ones that didn’t paint his father as a full-on asshole but just a confused, okay-hearted, perhaps bored man, trying, just trying, trying his and their lives away.

  “Birds?” his father squinted his eyes at the mention.

  “Yes, the birds, the dying birds,” Xerxes lazily muttered, his stomach upset with the oppressive oversoothing of warm milk.

  “Huh,” grumbled his father, neither an acknowledgment nor a negation.

  They were silent, both men waiting.

  “Do you eat any vegetables?” his father suddenly asked. “Potatoes?”

  Xerxes shook his head, brazenly.

  “You look sick,” his father finally raised his voice. He suddenly grabbed the bowl of Pebbles, walked over to one of Xerxes’s two windows—both barely equaling one of the windows of the house he grew up in, Darius Adam observed, just two narrow slits, just giving a slight, dreary glimpse at the dirty brick of another complex next door, hideous!—opened the latch and dumped the Pebbles out into the street.

  “That’s for those birds you want to talk about,” he snapped, and then lay down on Xerxes’s sofa/futon and proceeded to take a
nap. Xerxes knew well that the nap was just an excuse for his father to shut him out, his father who for unknown reasons was now in disgusted mode—although in Opposite Day logic his grumble could mean, I am so happy for you and your new life, son. Xerxes eyed his playing-dead pose and announced that he was going to go out for the paper, and went out, got a paper, sat inside the corner bar and had a Scotch on the rocks at five in the evening, alone.

  Once the door shut, Darius Adam popped his eyes open and sighed. He did not sit up. The whole thing exhausted him: his son’s life, the apartment, the East Coast, New York, the milk, the Pebbles, the bird shit. It was all bad. And to top it all off, he could not sleep. He hadn’t slept a night since he had gotten here. Sure, there were noises outside, honking cabs, screaming humans, city stuff, but he had been sure that he would sleep once away from certain unsavory elements of his world: For instance, his wife—no more of her constant elbow jabs and hissing in the middle of the night, something she swore she did in her sleep, though once in a fight she admitted she did it consciously, to get him back for snoring all the time. And work—no more being at the mercy of the community college’s odd hours—helming an Adult Education Chemistry class at 10 p.m., a Remedial Mathematics 1 class at 7 a.m., Beginning Bio for the English-as-a-Second-Language set at noon on Monday but 2 p.m. on Wednesdays and 5:30 p.m. on Fridays with a few Field Trip Saturdays of course, or the class he wished he could rename Slow Substanceless Science for the Senior Citizen Set which went on and on for two hours five days a week, 30 weeks a year; and no more backaches at the podium, no more having to listen to the sound of his robotic orator-voice for far too many hours a day a week a month years, correcting, reminding, answering, encouraging the hell out of them, over and over. Truly, he had plotted his vacation as running-off-to-evaluate-what-time-had-made-of-his-son, but it also had the merit of serving as a running away from all that low-level everyday knowing.