Sons and Other Flammable Objects Read online

  He warned her after proposing that he could see already that their marriage would be plagued with misery, that he was not his father, he was not blind and happy, he would not in that same meaningless way leave a family—he would rather control the family with a fist, he would expect things, maybe even demand things, and perhaps could go as far as not being trusted. She said she did not care, because obviously, in loving such a man, she deserved it and that she didn’t really care, just needed something to pass the years.

  They married.

  And they both thought like this on and on until the days when the Iranian Islamic revolution became a reality and took over their worlds, and turned their entire ungrateful existences upside down. Like much of their class, alarmed by the dark wave of new “R” words—reform, revolution, religion—they felt their old lives turn unrecognizable overnight. It was hard to tell if the nation was crumbling or building itself—agendas were traded for agendas, crass capitalism was melting down into austere theocracy, paranoias of the secret police were evaporated by the confusing darkness of an old God’s newest incarnation. Action dethroned thought—all their people knew to do was to move and move fast.

  And so on a train to Istanbul—fleeing, seeking neutrality, anonymity, normalcy, suddenly, both seized with the alarming reality that they were running away, fleeing from their homes, maybe forever—they looked at their young son, humming obliviously on his mother’s lap, and she brought it up with tears in her eyes, and he agreed instantly, that of all the naysayings they had done in their time together, perhaps the one they feared and regretted and hoped hadn’t cursed them the most was the one in the time of their dark courtship, where they had both agreed that if they ever had a child it would be miserable, untalented, ugly, uninspired, a nothing of an offspring, the end they would both deserve: an error even, at best.

  Darius, Part II

  Every great man makes some mistakes. This was his first one: in 512, Darius decided on a way to secure peace on the northern frontier of the empire; he would launch a war against the Scythian tribes. Wrongly, the army went to the Black Sea, where the Scythians were not, and the whole army got lost and frustrated and it came down to chaotic nothing. The catastrophes of geographical errors. Darius was haunted at the very least—he had to be. Herodotus, the over-eager historian of ancient misfortunes, is all too happy to tell his tale; as for Darius’s own inscriptions, generally he wrote it all, the good and the bad, but this episode is the only chunk of the inscription he left on which most of the tale has been destroyed. Who knows?

  Son, I hate to tell you that bad fortune in life is often answered with more bad fortune. The age of the Persian Wars had come. He made the preparations, took the meetings, laid out his plans, knowing well that it would be a trial larger than his lifetime. The world was in a state of chaos: Egypt uprising, Greece restless, Persia suddenly insecure, the pagan tribal world hungry. And so it came that after a rule of thirty-six years, with much unfinished business, Darius was killed—his murder nothing to ponder over, no biggo, as back then no great men died of natural causes, killers just appeared to assist history when they perceived these huge men’s pathetic ends, as if it were their natural duty—and there the bulk of the problems began for our people. Forever, really.

  In the year before his death, when he sensed his end—great men know confidently their descents as well their ascents—he had come to a time when he had to decide which out of all his sons would be his successor. He had the elder of his sons from a first wife, which a world law of sorts would dictate the crown would rightfully belong to. But he also had Xerxes, the first son born with Atossa, after he became a king, remember—Atossa, who had already paid great dues, wed constantly to the wrong dead men, from Cambyses to Smerdis until Darius (and he had to marry her in order to confirm the legitimacy of his taking the throne from her ex)—Atossa, who, sure, maybe he loved, but to whom we know he owed, must have felt so at least, because without pointing any fingers, they—history—gently tells us that she, unlike the wives of that age, had power over him and perhaps too much—Atossa, who didn’t know any better when she insisted that he choose her Xerxes … and since all children at a certain age, we can agree, are the same, well, he didn’t know any better either. Xerxes would be king.

  There is an old saying that exists in every language, including Persian, that translates roughly to this: “Every man is king of his domicile, but it is secretly his wife that really rules him.” In every man, this semiproverb lives, although precariously—it is seldom publicly acknowledged even between men, for they either A) dismiss it as cliché and prefer not to repeat it should their wives take it too seriously, or B) recognize it as true and prefer not to repeat it should their wives take it too seriously.

  Lala Adam knew it well. It equaled vengeance, the vengeance which she imagined must be a given in all marital unions. That was what you got for tying your life to this one person, chosen on some sort of essential whim, like picking a pebble on a pebble beach. They were all the same, and yet were they? Who knew?—Lala Adam gave it a rating of shrug. Darius had been her only lover, her one partner, and while there had been a few suitors, she really had no experience with romantic unions. She barely had a chance with herself.

  She blamed it on literally having had no model, no parents that she ever knew of, just aunts and uncles and grandparents and family friends and a brother, because her own parents were too busy spending the entirety of her childhood somewhere unimaginable, yes, walking with God perhaps. Among mountaintops indeed, she guessed, cold, icy, dark—just where they had left her.

  Lala’s parents had lost their lives in a car accident when she was five. She was in the car. So was her older brother, who was nine. There was an ice storm in the hills of Mount Damavand, and her parents—the wealthy weekend traveler type, that was what her memory preserved them as, two people ever in love, always in a car, eternally on the go—were driving. It was night and apparently the roads were icy and unsafe—unsafe for cars, unsafe for a family, a family with small children, helmed by young adults, four full futures ahead of them—when the car, apparently taking them home from a family gathering at a second or third cousin’s country home, deep in the thick unlit Iranian countryside night—a sky she remembers always possessing a blackness that was like negative space, a trick presence that was a true void, an infinity that was all dead-end—suddenly collided with what was described later as a jagged rock, causing the car to overturn and topple down into wilderness. The couple died; the children lived. In the following days, the police and the relatives repeated that their deaths had to be instantaneous, but who knew? Only her brother bore the burden of pure memory, the night in which he and his little sister—too little to fathom anything but a vague entrapment in an icy silent darkness—endured twelve hours in a car with dead or maybe slowly dying mostly mutilated parents, until finally well into daylight a farmer discovered the wreckage.

  The Iranians, Xerxes thought, it’s like they were made for tragedy, always trapped in some sad dramatic past, generational pain, familial anguish, personal turmoil, a collective tragic disposition, an almost genetic mass pessimism. Tragedy, everywhere; blood always in the air.

  Lala had many things she did not want to think, much less talk, about. One was her brother. Her parents, she would talk about them without pain, for luckily her memory kept them enstoned as the gorgeous young couple of family photos, with their expensive coats and wild smiles—but her brother, very much living, somewhere, anywhere, was a loss she could not bring herself to face anymore. For most of her childhood he had already been a bit lost, as much of a stranger as a brother could manage to be—always behind closed doors, in a private torture nobody could really grasp—and just when she felt old enough to face him, he packed his bags and disappeared without a word to her or the aunt and uncle who had raised them. It was on the night of his high school graduation. No one went looking for him really; it was expected that he would be off, gone seeming like his natural state. She
heard about him more than once, much later, from the occasional relative who would call to check on her—still out of the pity-reflex, feeling eternally responsible for her, still considering her their family tragedy, the little girl who was practically born out of the consummation of a dead couple they seemed to imply, to her disgust—and they always had some vague word that he was “out there.” Where, they never seemed to know for sure, but the family gossip always added up to some blurry black-and-white sketch of a sick man very much alone, his madness multiplying with every year. There were rumors he lived in Europe in a huge house and was attended to by many nurses; there were rumors he was deaf and blind and penniless and in Asia; there were rumors he was in the States, involved in drug trafficking; there were rumors he was in Iran all along, hiding in the rural bits not far at all from where his parents took their last ride. Lala never listened much to what they had to say—she never even asked. Eventually time fractured any contact she had with her relatives. She lost their numbers, neglected to keep track of their migrations, never learned the names of the new nieces and nephews and grandchildren and in-laws. Soon even her aunt and uncle became ghosts to her. They were there somewhere, but it would take something like foolishness for her to rouse them, she had convinced herself.

  There were other topics also: she had no comment on her old homeland, for instance. She wanted to break away from it, pretend that when they fled, all the everything that they left—a child’s nursery full of toys, their books, their clothes, their furniture, their lease, their families and friends, everything but two suitcases mostly full of photo albums and letters and some winter items for who knew where they would end up—all the loss helped make it over for her. She repeatedly claimed she was not interested in discussing that particular past, because, You cannot change it, you can’t even understand it, talk and thought doesn’t help, what’s done is done, and I think all I and my people want—if I can talk for my people, ha!—is a chance to live again, start our lives from where they were cut off midlife really, early life really, because with all that loss, I tell you, if I were to really spend my days facing that hell I would in a second put an ax to my neck. I’ll give you Iranian tragedy. It’s all there. …

  She was happy in America, she claimed, America with its Disneyland and Las Vegas—her two favorite destinations—home to ignorance and bliss, a land unloaded, haven without baggage, a fresh starting point for people to lose their minds!

  “You mean,” young Xerxes interjected, carefully considering his mother’s nonsense handling of the English language, “to forget their pasts? Let go of their memories, yes?”

  “Yes, lose their minds!” And so she did, little by little, carefully find ways to banish the old from the new, hoping the body might influence the rest of her. Her first change in the new country: dyed hair. Her dark classic black became an orangey-brown that she announced was “tawny honey,” pointing to the label and its overly tickled chestnut brunette. Her next move: the language. Never a bright student in Iran, never one to study much—certainly not enough in the many years of required and seemingly superfluous English classes—she suddenly began spending all her time and money in adult English classes, at one point taking two, insisting one was more conversational, the other for reading. She learned. She began having chats with people in the supermarket and the post office. She began mimicking their lazy pronunciations. It inspired her next move: the changing of her name from Laleh. After months of dealing with being called “Lale” and “Lah-lee” and at best “Laa-ley,” the answer finally came to her in the form of a credit card solicitation. Her first name, as usual, was misspelled, but somehow more kindly so. “LALA,” it said. She immediately liked it and showed it to Darius, who burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Lala?! Lay or Law? It looks ‘la la la’!”

  “What do you mean?” She asked, perplexed. The la’s didn’t translate—in Farsi, the sound for song was, after all, na-nye.

  “Oh, Miss English speaker doesn’t know her do re mi fa so la ti do! Ha!” Darius continued to mock, in no mood to throw her some rope. “La la la la la!”

  “What are you talking about?” she snapped.

  “La-la is American-nonsense-tongue for scales that are meaningless, children’s chorus stuff, like song filler. It is like tada or ching!”

  “Ching?”

  “My point is,” he enoughed, “it is not a name.”

  She scowled at him bitterly. Typical, she fumed as he walked off without the patience or care to get her to understanding—Understand what? understand nonsense?! he shrugged it off—but she understood, all right. Apparently just for the royal hell of it, in the kingdom of Darius Adam, there would be no “Lala’s.” Even if it did mean song—which now that he mentioned it, did vaguely ring a bell, like something she had sometime in the nebulous past heard on TV—but even if it meant just that, how like her bossy parade-rainer husband to denounce that. Oh, Laleh-the-Persian-flower-that-does-not-exist-in-America is fine, but Lala-the-sound-of-happy-children-singing-who-maybe-aren’t-paralyzed-by-their-family-tragedies-for-whom-not-everything-has-to-be-ancestral-and-plagued-and-deep, that Lala, no, it cannot exist! Not a name!

  “It is my name,” she announced to an empty room, loudly. “From now on.”

  To prove it she got a lawyer, paid him from their joint account, signed some papers, and came home one day to an unsuspecting at-peace Darius Adam and informed him Laleh Adam was dead and that there was only Lala, and if he did not recognize her he was breaking American law and could go to jail—she knew the last part couldn’t be all that true, but she thought it could at least seem somewhat feasible in a country so obsessed with all sorts of strange freedoms. Darius Adam refused to let his peace appear as disturbed as it truly was, so he shrugged and said nothing, and she stomped off, annoyed at his best tactic—the simple, anticlimactic nonanswer—but for the rest of their lives together, he stuck to Laleh when he absolutely had to say her name, making her cringe every time, once past the era where she would actually bother to correct him. Usually his preferred tactic was to call her “Woman,” or nothing at all. For his own reasons Xerxes Adam also automatically participated in the boycott of the oral pronunciation and thus active recognition of his mother’s new name—the Americanized change, yes, being shameful on one level (and her out of all people in their family with the simplest name!), but furthermore the meaningless tenor and his mother’s clownish sense of triumph over such a humiliating victory, it was too much, and just another example of how every man’s greatest embarrassments would be indelibly linked to his most immediate creators.

  Xerxes, King of Persia

  Fact: Darius was a solid good guy; Xerxes, while interesting, ruined everything.

  Xerxes, child of Darius and Atossa, ruled 485–465 BC, until he was killed in his own palace. Imagine that. He was known as the Persian king despised by the Greeks. He was the king who reigned over ancient Persia’s decline from mighty power to fading empire, would you believe? He was the way down, while his father was the way way up. Ahem.

  While Darius was regarded as a natural leader, a self-built man, Xerxes was spoiled and rottened. Easy to go for great when you have Dad’s successes to feed you, no? He was raised in the very nice rich Persian courts, among slaves and women. Blessed and cursed. Had it not been for his father’s glorious track record it may not have even occurred to him to follow through with the ultimately disastrous Greek expedition. They say it was his vain ways and the prospect of topping his father’s fame that fueled him so crazily.

  And why am I named after this total loser?

  Because after Darius, Xerxes comes next, no stopping it, son—enough! Besides, some call it a kind of greatness—Xerxes became a legend in his own way. Herodotus tells us that after a storm on the Hellespont delayed Xerxes from crossing into Greece, Xerxes ordered that the waters be given three hundred lashes as punishment—yes! It was said that his army was so huge that it took the entire population of a large city just to feed them e
ach day, while whole rivers and streams would run dry from their thirst—whoa! Old Xerxes was full of good story food, but even just that says something—when a man has this much fluff about him, this much head in clouds, this much smoke in eyes, what does it say about the man? Poor Darius was rewriting his life plain and simple on walls of dirt and rock, reliefs he knew were destined for nothing but ruins. Xerxes meanwhile was stimulating the imaginations of bored historians with fog and fairy dust. Big-wow guy, I guess, but in the end big wow does not pay the rent of a nation, you know?

  You got that from me.

  Oh, big wow for the big wow, son! Anyway … you can imagine that he had his father on his mind. So much so that ten years after Darius was defeated by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, Xerxes got together a big army to invade Greece and get revenge for his father’s loss. Good boy, but of course he did it his way. His troops of ten thousand were fancy in dress and weapon, more fit for show than battle. It was in the ways of their leader—foolish boy—what could they do, these grown men, rough soldier types, all suddenly draped in heavy golds and gems, done up, weighed down. Xerxes: all showtime, and what a show. It gets worse: he’s telling his men they can’t cross the Hellespont by ship as that would have been too easy, of course—no, Xerxes wants a symbolic link that would bring worlds together for him, having his men work for years to build bridges that would connect the continents! Would you believe?! Where are they now? Absurd waste of all humankind’s time—we would have been at least a couple years ahead if it hadn’t been for the wastey ways of your namesake. Anyway, after Xerxes crossed the Hellespont he took over Greece. He won a costly victory at Thermopylae—the famous battle which ended with three hundred Spartan warriors creaming the entire Persian army in a last battle to the death—and finally reached Athens and captured the deserted city. There is a fine line always between victory and defeat, one must always be aware of the edge and know the boat can be easily rocked, but apparently Xerxes thought he was riding high. Suddenly, the Persian navy was routed by the Greek fleet at Salamis and hundreds of Persian ships were lost. The invasion ended in this disaster. The Persians, just barely past their moment of glory, had suddenly fallen—at the high point where it hurts the most to fall. Xerxes was left to retreat to his palace in Persepolis. His army was defeated by the Greeks shortly thereafter. And in spite of the defeat, Persia remained an important nation. And in spite of Xerxes suddenly withdrawing from his duties and, according to Herodotus, finding more interest in “the intrigues of the harem.” Yes, oh, yes. Fifteen years later Xerxes was stabbed to death, probably by the order of his son who succeeded him, Artaxerxes; or the captain of his royal guards, Artabanus—in any case, by one of the men closest to him. Assassins, like I said, were no biggo back then, but to die by the hand of those close to you—well, there’s a certain type that gets that end. That is how it is when you walk the line between famous and infamous, genius and madman, leader and dictator—the first thing to go: your mind; the second: the men closest to you. The women, the children, the riches, it takes a while for them to break off. But the men who were by your side, who saw it all, who can read you, who are your only true reflection, those guys, with a swift stab behind you, they’re out for you—oh, when everyone is out for you, hell, be thankful for when the curtain drops, when the end ends, because, son, at certain points even nothing is better than nothing.