By Shahab Eddin Pakbeen

It is the last day of Dr. Brian Adams’s leave. He lives on the eighth floor of Paradise Tower.

It is eleven o’clock in the morning. Adams walks over to his usual barber’s shop, readying himself for his first day back at work after a month away.

A month earlier, a young boy had been left permanently paralyzed after Adams operated on him. The medical review board found Adams at fault, but his record was strong enough to save his career. He was forced to take a month off.

That month, Adams never left the city, went to the movies, or cooked. He walked eight kilometers a day and rearranged things around his apartment several times. Everything except the room he had shared with his ex-wife and his son’s room.

The barber has a cold. Whenever he coughs near Adams’s ear, Adams draws his head back a few inches. His hair ends up shorter than usual, his sideburns uneven. As always, not a word passes between them. Adams pays, leaves his usual tip, and takes the receipt. A corner is bent. He presses it flat with his thumb. It curls back up. He crushes the receipt and stuffs it into his back pocket.

He wants out. He pulls his jacket sharply from the coat rack. The metal zipper pull catches on his wedding ring and bends out of shape. Outside, he cannot make himself wait until he gets all the way home. He stops and tries to straighten it, but presses too hard and bends the metal the other way. This time he presses more gently. Almost straight. Just a little more. He presses. The zipper pull snaps.

He closes his fist around the broken piece and hurries home in short steps.

Still dressed, he finds a replacement zipper and goes at it with a screwdriver, forcing the new one into place. The doorbell rings. The pizza has arrived. He opens the box. The cheese has stuck to the lid, pulling some topping away with it. He closes the box, crushes it, and throws it in the trash. He washes his hands and returns to the zipper.

The screwdriver slips, cuts his palm, and knocks into his half-finished cup of coffee. Coffee spills across a book he bought yesterday, whose cover creased when he put it in his bag, and which he has ironed five times since. Adams grabs the book and wipes at the cover with his sleeve. The stain spreads. He rubs harder. Two wet pages tear. He holds his breath, gritting his teeth. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.

He hurls the book across the room. It strikes the apartment’s only framed photograph. The frame falls and shatters. Adams pulls the photograph from the broken glass. A shard cuts his palm. On the right, the woman. In the middle, the boy. On the left, the exposed edge where part of the photograph has been cut away. Blood drops onto the woman’s face.

His gaze shifts from his son’s face to the tree standing behind him.

The boy is among the branches again, and Adams is filming him.

“Dad! Look at me! See how high I climbed!”

The boy’s foot slips. The image tilts. A moment of black. Then blue sky.

Adams gathers the boy into his arms. The mother screams:

“Brian, do something.”

Adams says nothing. He only looks into his son’s eyes. Moments later, the boy dies in his arms. Adams stays there, gripping his son’s hands in his own.

The phone screen still shows blue sky. The mother wails offscreen: “Give me my baby! You killed him!”

Adams sets the photograph carefully on the bookcase and takes his phone. He opens the video. His son’s voice comes through the speaker:

“Dad! Look at me! See how high I climbed!”

He sets the phone down and goes to lie on the couch where he sleeps at night. A few shards of glass are caught in the blanket.

He returns to the zipper.

He grips the zipper pull between his teeth, trying to work it back onto the track. His bloodied hand slips; the metal catches the inside of his lower lip. He jerks back; his lip splits. Blood runs onto the collar of his sky-blue shirt.

He pulls the shirt over his head, smearing blood across the fabric with his palm.

He removes the rest of his clothes and goes into the bathroom. He pauses in front of the mirror and takes a pair of electric clippers from the cabinet. He tries to even out his sideburns, but each attempt leaves one slightly higher or lower than the other, until they have crept above his ears. After several attempts, he shaves off all his hair.

He brushes shaving cream over his scalp and slowly draws the razor across the skin. His skull is uneven; the blade catches on the ridges, but he keeps going. When he finishes, several places on his scalp are bleeding.

He turns on the hot water and stands beneath the shower with his eyes closed. Stepping out, he rinses off his feet and puts on his slippers. He carries the shirt, jacket, and book into the bathroom and lines them up in the tub. He retrieves the crushed pizza from the trash and wedges it in beside them. He sees the coffee and bloodstains on the carpet. He pauses. He takes the blanket from the couch and fits it into the tub as well.

He takes rubbing alcohol from his son’s closet and returns with a lighter. He picks up his phone. He pours the alcohol over the contents of the tub and flicks the lighter until a flame catches.

He records the fire on his phone. The flames spread from the shirt to the book and jacket, then catch the blanket. He throws the phone into the tub. He tries to take off his wedding ring, but it is stuck on his finger. He takes a pair of wire cutters from the cabinet, cuts the ring while it is still on his finger, and throws it into the fire. The gold ring glows in the flames and slowly turns orange. The shower curtain catches fire. Adams’s gaze stays on the faucet. The flames rise. He stands motionless, naked except for the slippers still on his feet. He looks at himself in the mirror.

Outside, the seventeen-story Paradise Tower is already burning.

                                                      *   *   *

Shahab Eddin Pakbeen is an Iranian fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Markaz Review. His fiction is forthcoming in Queen’s Quarterly, Gone Lawn, The Hamilton Stone Review, and Does It Have Pockets.