Sons and Other Flammable Objects Read online

  So to make short this longer story, Darius killed the usurper and won the crown. And he took the usurper’s wife, Atossa. That’s how things went back then. Of course. She was happy, by the way—she was okay. Find one like this, by the way—the ones you don’t have to kiss up to or do big things for, the ones you don’t have to fight either, or buy or force. Find an easy one—they’ll look hard, and maybe only much later will they become that hard. Atossa, from what I can guess, didn’t care too much about what happened as long as something did happen. Behind the scenes, she had more than enough control, as they often do.

  It’s the others you worry about. Because people being stupid jealous bastards like they are now, they rebelled. Everywhere in the eastern provinces, Babylon and elsewhere, usurpers ran for office, fakes claiming the right to rule, con artists posing as heirs of the royal race, and they gathered their armies. Darius, with only a small army of hard but good guys, shut them up, smoked them, and went undisturbed. Because he might not have had men’s support, but he always had God’s. He was king.

  He was the king. He was known for his organization skills, for creating states, extending and drawing borders in total wilderness, forming governments, and for bringing civilization to the early world. He had no time for barbarous tribes. He introduced gold coinage to the world. He dug a canal from the Nile to the Suez. He expanded commerce. His ships sailed the seas on constant exploratory expeditions, all the way to Sicily.

  He is documented in hieroglyphics, in Jewish scriptures, in the Vatican. He was seen as a high priest, a spiritual statesman. He is the reason all the Greek oracles in Asia Minor and Europe stood on the side of Persia in the Persian wars and told the Greeks to attempt no resistance. Their enemies couldn’t even rest easy as enemies. This, son, is more power than power itself, you see?

  He is documented in the Bible, if you want enemy evidence. Nobody is proud or ashamed, it is what it is, but basically it was his order that placed Daniel in the den of lions. Yes. It was Darius who made Daniel one of the administrators to rule over his 120 satraps. Darius’s stupid but loyal satraps feared him so much that they did anything in their power to please their king. But when Daniel started looking too good—who knows, he was probably a kiss-ass or a fake, or perhaps good, I don’t know, the Bible is written so you can’t really figure out anything, sorry (don’t read it, by the way)—it appeared that the king might appoint him as the only administrator and have him rule over his kingdom with increasing power as, say, an adviser. Well, the satraps, thinking they were doing good for the king, I guess—and who knows, maybe they were, who knows what history would look like if history had a nudge and tuck and rip here and there—they decided to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs. But they couldn’t find a piece of his dirty laundry. Finally the satraps decided to pin him in a way no one could prove really for or against: in matters that had to do with God—on impossible charges basically. So the administrators and the satraps went as a group to the king and said their usual ‘O King Darius, live forever!’ and then they said Darius should issue a law that anyone who prays to any god or man during the next thirty days, except, of course, their king Darius—I guess in a move to symbolically free up God’s time so God could just be one-on-one with Darius, not a bad gesture—anyone else shall be thrown into the lions’ den. Well, Darius wasn’t a fool—who would say no to that? When an intelligent man hears something that will work for him, why not?! And all it would take would be a break from God for his masses. No biggo, right? Who would have guessed goody-goods God-obsessed Daniel would mess up his own life, and there, thoughtlessly, put one of the first dents in East-West relations, by making Darius look like a cruel, unusual dictator.

  Ah, Daniel 6:1–8. But, Dad, isn’t the moral more like—

  Enough, checking facts, the nerve of you. … Look, Daniel doesn’t learn a thing and is a biblical hero. And so what, Darius rules on. And even if the whole story is true, maybe it taught the masses a few things: people loved this man and his devotees would do anything to keep him powerful. He was a man of law and when laws were made, he went with them all the way. And lastly, he was a man of power and what a trap that is—power, of whatever nature, good or evil, in the larger scope of things, all amounts to the same. Remind you of your era? You wish. Your era thinks they’re gonna live forever—they won’t. Wait till burst goes that bubble and you see the ugly side of the real world—in every man’s life the world’s worst shows itself. Darius was all too aware and I think he feared death, like a normal God-fearing common man. You’re not a full man until you feel that fear, and commit to live with it, and further, to die by it. For Darius that fear must have suddenly overcome him upon his great-dom, and it must have become like a shadow before him—a fear you can always see, especially in the sunlight, your shadow always at your side, sharpest when you are shining the most. To get by, the happiest of men are ignorant of their shadow, simply blind to its existence. But not the great, truly powerful ones—certainly not Darius. Fear is their fuel.

  It was Darius’s own father who taught him “Enough.” His “Enough” however was a different “Enough.” When he cut someone’s sentence off with an abrupt “Enough,” it was about merciful truncation, the “Enough” that said, Okay, son, okay, wife, let’s just snip that sentiment off right there at its best, nicest, happiest point, before it goes bad. It was Darius’s father who would silently wander off just before he sensed a movie’s climax would strike, not interested in the boiling point that would lead to the chaos and the danger and the misery—he would often walk back in for the last few minutes which he, without fail, always sensed correctly: a musical number, a final kiss, an end that was a beginning really. The old man was not interested in the ugly things in life—he was interested in turning frowns, indeed, upside down. Bring up death and before you could add a word, he was “Enough”-ing it back to life. He would remind them that life was short, there was no time to waste dwelling on wars, nightmares, farts, earwax, tragedy. The old man even had dull brown eyes that were always comfortingly murky; young Darius imagined the fogginess was the mucousy film of nice dreams, the half-blinding blanket of goodness, an obscuring handicap that gave the world its more cordial tint. Darius’s own eyes, flashing and black, were always desperately clear—he saw everything, and generally everything was as bad. As bad, he would insist, as what his father seemed to be hinting with the enforcement of his adamantly benevolent, fascistically celebratory, false optimism.

  Unlike that seething cartoon-cat scowl that Xerxes’s mind’s eye always equated with Darius, Darius’s memories of his father were of him constantly mid-smile, smiling through everything. Apathetically smiling at Darius’s being sent home from school for sulking too much: He’ll, they’ll, everyone will get over it, that, everything really—insistently smiling at his first stillborn child: God got him back, he is the lucky one, not us—deliriously smiling at a thief in their house during Darius’s twelfth birthday party: Robber, I am sure you will realize what you are doing is wrong, and will leave shortly, otherwise I am sure you will take what you will and leave us, and our lives will go on, agreed?—softly smiling at his wife’s inexplicable bouts of crying later in her life: It is just the eyes, and maybe the soul, no difference, cleaning themselves out, perfectly normal, woman—rigidly smiling at the news of his mysterious disease, the malignant cells that were doing everything in their power to chip at his aged anatomy, ultimately winning in a matter of months—and what is the surprise in that, we all knew our lives were temporary. No regrets, no tears, no needless helpless sadness, you hear me? Enough.

  Darius secretly worshipped his father. But the worship was complicated, sometimes by hate. How he would stuff Darius’s early silences with singing—the old man forty years his son’s senior, bald and big-bellied, although still managing a lithe lankiness with his towering six-foot-five stature—suddenly breaking out into cringe-worthy off-key maudlin song, most likely songs he made up, often snapping a
long with a rhythm only he sensed, a seated jiggling that almost resembled dancing. It was too much for Darius, who felt zero connection to any internal rhythm. Sometimes to make him stop Darius would say, Father, I have something to say. For a second the old man would stop, Darius would be silent, but then he would start again. But Father, I have to tell you something. And so he would stop and Darius, unable to think of anything, would resort to telling his father something terrible, just to hear that comforting promise-filled “Enough” rather than all the nonsense jigs—something like, Father, I would like you to address something I think of every night, every day, namely that I am very scared of the fact that we all have to die.

  He would want his father to himself, but it would be rare. There were always house parties, when the old cottage would be filled with strange-smelling relatives all eager to kiss and hug and pinch him, all saying the same nice things, with their pots full of cold plastic-looking stews, their baskets of badly bruised apples and pomegranates, their fistfuls of stale almonds and cracked candy—all contributing to Darius’s hating relatives and parties and most food for the rest of his life. But he remembered one house party in particular, the first time he had consciously registered his father drinking alcohol, finally old enough to understand drunkenness at fourteen. His father, as usual, was at the center of attention, but more so even with a few extra and sometimes punch-line-less jokes, a zanier brand of his usual unshakable tyrannical happiness … and he remembered a guest, maybe an aunt, or a cousin—who knew the difference between any of them?—making an announcement. Her voice had broken through the chatter with an elated shakiness, declaring, It must be said, our host and his lovely wife are the best couple in our midst, by far! Darius remembered his father applauding and then swaying a bit in his inebriated state, making it to the kitchen, bringing his flustered wife over, and asking the guest to kindly repeat the compliment so his wife could hear. She did. And Darius’s mother—maybe drunk, too, who knew—modestly laughed softly and wiped an eye, taking her husband’s hand, waiting for him to say what had clearly been on the tip of his tongue for several minutes, or maybe his whole life, yet another perfect proclamation, a near-proverbial utterance, one that would send chills down Darius’s spine forever, whenever he’d think of his father—particularly years later at the old man’s deathbed, when the impact hit more ironically and sadly than ever, oh, the deep poignant horror of the beautiful devastating declaration—My friends, he had announced without a moment’s reservation in front of them, in front of them all, You see, I would take the deaths of my very own children before my wife’s—it is true, that is how strong our love is!

  And Darius sat with his sister and brother, both of them under ten, he the only child old enough to fully comprehend the atrocity and, apparently, the nobility.

  Many decades later the old man’s sentiment, by the powers of some cruel genetic osmosis perhaps, made its way organically into Darius’s own heart. One early Sunday morning, with Xerxes still in that viscous sleep of prepubescents, Darius and his wife woke up immediately snappy, ready for a fight, any fight, somehow both of their belligerent moods coinciding. It was rare for them both to be so simultaneously invested in a fight, but there they were, whispering sharply, hissing like riled snakes, whipping insults at each other as they swallowed hard whole bites of their cold breakfasts in an unlit kitchen, until finally the episode required a climax, and he snapped Enough Enough Enough!, waved her away, readied his teacup and turned on the stove, and accidentally set the gas flames on his wife’s stove-top-lounging hands. She screamed so loudly that Xerxes rose out of his cruddy slumber, in time to witness the spectacle of his mother’s shaking charred peeling hand, sound-tracked with her animal moaning. That against his father franticly pacing in circles, searching for his keys, muttering, It was an accident, it was an accident, finally following his hysterical wife out the door, and slamming it on their son without an explanation. Later, in the emergency room of the hospital, Darius found himself turning to her, perhaps crazed to the point of involuntarily repeating some unhappy history, and saying something much bigger and much more horrible than an apology, something he felt had been in his system since that childhood house party, that he, too, perhaps, in the confusing moments when forced to evaluate love and loss had to face: My wife, he had said, in a voice that was not his, gasped it out, My wife, when I accidentally did this to you, all I could think then and now is that I am so regretful of your pain, your pain ever, that I would in fact rather have it be my own or even my own Xerxes’s pain—I feel it that much, do you understand me? She had looked at him awestruck, and finally, when she could manage the words, warned him firmly that he had better shut the hell up or she’d have one more reason to wish him dead.

  The Iranians, Xerxes thought, were always wishing things dead, imagining death, wondering about the dead, ready to curse everything with dead-stuff. Death was everywhere.

  “Enough”: it was not Darius’s old man’s last word, as many would have probably plugged into his voice, say, in the novel of his life. His last words unfortunately—so so unfortunately, all the family secretly thought to themselves—were a request for a sip of marrow jam, something that it was safe to say was utter nonsense, but forever emblemized in his family as a poetic man’s final motion at natural poesy.

  Darius was eighteen, and he thought stunted by it, because even at that point the idea of death, something that he obsessed over every spare minute of his adolescence without any resolution, never made any sense to him. He asked his mother, So, where exactly—and if you don’t mind being as specific as possible, I’d appreciate that—is Father, in your opinion? And she, frail, tired, suddenly an old lady overnight after his death—turned to him each time and snapped, Oh, of course, he is walking with God. And Darius having heard the phrase before, understanding what a euphemism was—pressed further, But what do you mean by that exactly, Mother, if I may ask? What does this walking with God really mean? Do you literally mean walking? Is he walking with God, like a friend? To where? From where? Are they speaking? His mother, frustrated and tired, would agree to it all, and in playing along turn the abstraction awfully concrete—because it was always easier to render a world literal, since the possibilities of the figurative, rhetorical, and speculative were inanely multitudinous, the older Xerxes later rationalized—she’d agree, Yes, he and God are walking. They began at this world. Now they are walking to the other. It is … a mountain. A long winding road up a mountain. They are talking about how much your father loves us. Your father looks good, happy. So does God. They are also talking about how much better it is to be where he is than where we are. They are having a good time. And Darius would ask, And so that in your opinion is the kingdom of heaven? And she would think and pride herself on being able to quickly manufacture an apt conclusion: The kingdom of heaven, as I see it, is a place we in our heads know to be the kingdom of heaven, but the dead, when in it, have no idea, so they wander with God through its roads and valleys and peaks, and climb endlessly, and only God knows they are not going anywhere, that they are just in it, that it is what it is. The dead are very ignorant. They have no need to know. The dead don’t understand “dead.” The dead are very happy.

  Darius became the man of the house. At the age of eighteen, on top of being a student—Darius had been accepted into a mathematics program at the local Tehran college—he became responsible for his sister and brother and even his mother. He took an extra job selling sour apples and iced sherbet on the streets to support them. His mother, resenting their lot in life, her husband’s passing for no apparent reason, no explanation but some unnamed killer inside him that had decided to deprive his family for the rest of their lives—decided to mostly ignore Darius and pretend that he wasn’t saving their lives. Darius believed that in those final ten years in Iran they had at most three longish conversations. The rest: single sentences, where both parties felt the resentment and blamed it on a dancing, singing, mysteriously summoned dead man dreaming of marrow
jelly while traipsing around on a mountaintop with God. …

  The older Darius speculated that his sudden distance from his mother around that time led to his low opinion of the female gender. I have problems with my mother, I suppose you should know that, he found himself often telling women he dated, knowing instinctually that it must be important information for women. Most women would giggle it off and even pretend they were relieved, and then in a matter of weeks or, at best, months, dump him.

  Until he met his wife—with whom he found himself taking it further, I don’t like my mother at all really, what do you make of that? She had shrugged and so he had added, Or women, most women really …? She had looked at him glumly, eyes as dimly lit then as ever, and muttered, Neither do I. Except I hate men, too. When Darius thought about it some more, he felt he agreed.

  During their courtship, nothing meant more to him than their common misanthropy. How relaxed he would be when they would go out to a popular Tehran eatery and he would notice its flaws, and then she would suddenly voice them, or else it would be she who would be visibly jarred, and he’d manage to pinpoint her complaint and moan about it. They would bitch and outbitch. They would go out dancing and instead of actually dancing they would have conversations about how all humans looked stupid dancing. They would share a bottle of wine and agree amid their drunkenness that feeling drunk was miserable. They would have sex and chastise themselves for not having waited to do this really overly championed thing when you thought about it—what a ludicrous, monkeylike, nasty, clumsy, ugly act it was. He would point out that she had the typical bumpy too-big Persian nose that he, unlike most Persian men, did not fetishize at all whatsoever. She would point out that his bony furry back repulsed her.