Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (10 page)

Without looking at Rasheed, Kelly placed her palm on her forehead and took a deep breath of lost patience.

“What? I love African Americans!” Rasheed proclaimed.

“You are not white. Arabs are not white. No matter how light-skinned you are, you will never be considered white.” She excused herself to go to her gospel church.

Rasheed turned to Max and forced a smile. “It is very good she is wanting to help others. I am pleased about this.”

Kelly spent more and more time with Rodney during the day. At first she mumbled excuses around Max for why she went over there—“Out of eggs. I’ll go see if the neighbors will lend us some”—and then came back hours later, eggless. She eventually stopped giving pretexts and just hung out with Rodney for hours on end. Max gathered from his living room observation point that she tended to leave a few minutes before Nadine got home from work: sometimes at five, sometimes at eight, and other times early the next morning, presumably when Nadine worked night shifts at the hospital.

Rasheed never asked how Kelly passed her days. He never complained about anything but his finances, and otherwise he tiptoed around her, in admission of guilt for having done something awful. Irredeemable. Even though it was Max and Kelly who had done something irredeemable.

Max was in the tree house even more now, alone in that clammy obscurity, with the labored breathing and light-headedness that his fear of death brought on. Now more than ever did he feel he deserved the punishment of lying in that box.

Sometimes Mr. Yang called up to the tree house window, inviting him over for tea and saving him from himself. Max watched videos with Mrs. Yang and Robby. They put on the subtitles for him when they played reruns of Ricky Wu, the bounty hunter the police contacted when they stumbled upon an unprecedentedly complex case at the start of each episode. Mrs. Yang sat openmouthed, half-smiling at the TV, scrubbing blue and green mold off soy-paste patties with a brush. She fermented them for two weeks in an electric blanket, making an aroma that Max visualized as a yellow-gray cloud of sweaty
butt and dirty socks. Amazingly, the cloud stayed contained around the blanket, its smell never extending farther than a couple feet from its origin. At the Yangs’, everything seemed superhumanly under control.

After she finished cleaning one patty off, she placed it in a large bowl of warm water between Robby and herself. The patties broke down into paste, creating a dense, batter-textured liquid. She placed a whole egg, shell and all, in the bowl and salted the paste until the egg rose back up from the bottom. This meant it was done. Max never thought to ask how she used the paste.

He never thought to ask why the Yangs did a lot of things: why they woke up at five every morning when they had nothing in particular to do that they couldn’t accomplish later in the day (trimming bonsais, cleaning windows, drinking tea, plucking pears, watering the lawn, and carefully opening mail); or why Mr. Yang took such pleasure in crouching to the floor and removing Mrs. Yang’s shoes for her while she watched TV, and how she hardly noticed him doing this; or why she cut his nose hairs, when, given the angle, Max knew it was easier for him to do it himself in the mirror; or why Mrs. Yang stroked her chin like she had a pointy goatee; or why she held purple grapes between her fingers as if they were exceptionally rare and fragile, placing one in front of her O-shaped mouth and sucking it in with a sudden inhalation. Her eyes brightened as she bit down and burst the grape open. And Max didn’t get why the Yangs forced an hour of arts and crafts on Robby every day, when Robby clearly didn’t give a shit about arts and crafts. For Robby, the name of the game was chaos: squirting glue, mangling construction paper, throwing glitter in the air and watching it snow down on the Yangs’ black and silver hair.

Max and Mrs. Yang sat cross-legged, backs against the couch. Robby was asleep on the cream carpet, snoring. It sounded like
a snowy television set being turned up and down. He wore a fuzzy strawberry pajama suit, and his shoulders twitched every once in a while from the fabulous adventures or terrors that seizured his dreams.

As the Ricky Wu credits rolled, Max surprised himself by exclaiming, “I don’t understand why my dad and Kelly live together.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Yang said.

“Just seems like if you don’t really like someone, you shouldn’t live with them, right?”

“A person will accept many bad thing in order to not be a lonely one.”

“But he was less of a lonely one before. We were fine.”

“You must know that this is not the same,” she said. “Maybe you do not know the good thing she provide your father.”

“I’ve heard of sex, Mrs. Yang.”

He didn’t know he was making a joke until she erupted into her sirening laughter and Mr. Yang’s boyish giggle bounced in from the greenhouse. Robby woke up in a state of alarm, and Mrs. Yang pressed her hand on his forehead. Tranquilized by her touch, he plunked limply to the carpet again.

“Okay!” Mr. Yang said, coming into the living room, pointing at Max with his pocket pruner. “But also it is very hard to know what a couple is really like behind the closed door. Not only with the sex, Max, but in all way. People have so many different need. You cannot understand a couple when you are not inside the couple. Only the couple can really know the couple. And even they do not always really know.”

Max said, “I thought he needed a girlfriend to feel better, but I’ve never seen him look worse. And he doesn’t do anything about it. Just lets it happen.”

“Then you must let it happen too,” Mrs. Yang said.

Years before the tree house, Max believed anything he planted in the backyard had a good chance of growing into a tree. So he buried things like chewing gum, dried spaghetti, hard-boiled eggs, a mug, some of Rocket’s hair, hamburger buns, a bottle of San Pellegrino. Today, long after he’d understood that none of those things would sprout into magnificent trees, he crawled around the yard with Rocket, trying to dig them all back up to throw in the garbage. His desire to clean had spanned underground. He didn’t find most of the stuff, but he did unearth a petrified lemon that had been painted gold. Yes, he remembered it now. It was the most gorgeous lemon he’d ever bought, and thinking himself clever, he decided to invest it into a tree where more lemons like it would grow, rather than just indulge in it straight away. He got the idea to paint it gold many times over—because it was too difficult to leave such a perfect thing alone—and after five or six coats, he
planted it. When nothing happened for long enough, he forgot about it.

He contemplated the hardened little fruit a while, holding it up to let the sunlight shatter against it. Cracks in the gold paint showed threads of the lemon’s black and red skin. He felt a baffling hatred toward the lemon. He pitched it at his tree house as hard as he could. It flew through the window and knocked around loudly before lying still.

On the afternoon of Max’s thirteenth birthday, a week before his summer break ended, Rasheed took him shopping. During car rides Max imagined his eyes shot lasers that cut down trees. His rule was that he had to retract his lasers for non-trees. Any homes, metal poles, stores, people, etc., would in fact deflect the laser back at Max and destroy him and his father.

They’d driven to the store in the ’77 Toyota Celica. None of the doors opened from the inside anymore. Rasheed had to roll down the window, reach out, and find the handle on the exterior to pop it open. When parked, Rasheed asked for the window crank in the voice of a doctor demanding a scalpel. Max got the tool from the glove box and slapped it into his father’s hand. The screw thread on the inside of the crank was mostly stripped, and it took a delicate touch to catch it on the door and get the window to come down. With only one
crank, Rasheed was strict about keeping it in the glove compartment, as if someone might steal it. When Max had once teased him about this, Rasheed asked, “If you think this is so funny, you may tell me where the three other window cranks went, huh?”

After Rasheed got his window down and opened his door, he jogged around the front, making a funny blowfish face through the windshield, and opened Max’s.

In the department store Rasheed insisted on buying Max any shirts or pants he glanced at. Watching his father spend money on things he didn’t need was a guilt-ridden experience. When Max told him he didn’t want so much clothing, Rasheed said, “It’s a big pleasure for me to buy you gifts. Do you want me to stop having this pleasure?”

At one of the T-shirt racks, Rasheed gazed at a fluorescent ceiling light as he worked his thumb and pointer into his nostril, extracting a hair. He held the white-rooted hair to the light and examined it as though he’d found a bone that might be the missing link to a prehistoric mystery. Max mustered the courage to say, “Kelly seems a little upset these days.”

“What? What are you saying, Max? What happened?” Rasheed dropped the nose hair.

“I mean, are you two happy behind closed doors?”

“What is this question?”

“Why is she always acting like you did something horrible?”

“Oh, come on. She is having the rough patch in her life, Maxie. Be bigger hearted, please. We don’t have very good work situations, and she feels maybe unstable.” He put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “When a woman is feeling like this, we must be even more patient and loving and tell her everything is all right. Never forget this. When she is upset, you must wait nicely for it to be over, like bad weather. There is nothing to do about it. It will pass. Like weather. Right?”

“Right.” Though with bad weather you take cover, or put on more layers. In any case, you defend yourself.

Back from shopping, they pulled onto their street to drop off their things and get dressed up before going out to dinner. There were cars lined up along both curbs. “Wow,” Rasheed said, seeing a party through Nadine and Rodney’s living room window, “a lot of African Americans, huh?” They parked in their driveway and Rasheed asked for the crank.

For at least ten minutes, Rasheed tried catching the screw to get the window down. The crank had finally been stripped clean and would not work again. They were trapped.

“Why is it like this?” Rasheed said. His breath was harsh because he never drank water. He said he already ate food with water inside it—“like apples, hamburgers, pieces of pie, all of these things have water inside. I don’t like to be chugging liquids directly, this makes me feel like I’m drowning, and I want to vomit.”

It was dusk. The tendons in Rasheed’s forearms twitched, shaking his canopy of arm hair as he tried the crank again and again. He tried all the windows, but none of them worked. The lights in the house were off; Kelly wasn’t home.

“Okay,” Rasheed said, “I must break this window.”

“Dad.” Max thought they should back out of the driveway and honk at the neighbors’ party. Someone would surely come out to help them.

Rasheed ignored him and stabbed at the window twice with the crank, like in a horror movie.

“Dad?”

The crank sliced his hand open, and he yelped, “Shitman!” Blood flowered out of his palm. Rasheed took off his shirt and wrapped his hand in it, the red soaking through. Flustered, Max
took off his shirt too and handed it to him. Rasheed contemplated it for a second before tossing it on the dashboard.

He ordered Max to the back of the car so he could lie on the passenger seat and kick at the driver’s window. The musky smell of his father’s body odor and blood stung Max’s nose as he climbed to the back and got on his knees, looking out the rear at the party across the street. Kelly was over there, in their living room, drinking a cocktail, talking to some lady. Rasheed kicked once. “It’s a very strong car.” He unwrapped his hand; the bleeding had stopped.

An enormous black woman came out of the party and into the street. She wore a royal blue ruffled blouse and long skirt combination with glossy white shoes. A gold cross the size of a big starfish rested on her cleavage, glinting in the sundown. Max slapped at the window to get her attention, shouting, “Excuse me! Help! Help!”

“What are you doing, Max?” his father asked, his bare legs bicycling the air, jean shorts riding up to his crotch.

She peered at the car for a beat before her eyes exploded into panic. She saw a shirtless boy begging to be freed, and Rasheed’s woolly legs kicking in the background.

“Oh my God!” she shouted. “Help! Help!” Her voice was astounding. No distress signal or gong or horn had ever resounded so loudly. Max motioned for her to open the door, and she hustled over. As soon as he put a foot on the driveway, she snagged his wrist and yanked him behind her.

“Okay. Good,” Rasheed said, writhing his way back into the driver’s seat. She saw the totality of this hairy, shirtless man with a bloody hand and threw the back door shut. She leaned her back on the front door, not knowing he was imprisoned in there anyway. “Oh no you don’t!” she screamed. Her volume had attracted a swarm of guests from the party; at least twenty people flowed out and headed over.

“What’s it?” Rasheed said, leaning his ear against the window.

With little space between the driver’s door and the shrubs that separated the Yangs’ property from theirs, the people had to pack tightly to see what was happening. The sun had set, and everyone turned into agitated silhouettes. Rocket howled inside the house. Robby sang, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” jumping up and down, unsure if he was overjoyed or frightened. Many still had their drinks, holding them above heads or over people’s shoulders like at a crammed concert.

Max said, “It’s okay, that’s my dad,” but somehow his voice didn’t work. It came from his throat, not his belly, and didn’t carry over all the other noise.

The woman kept wringing Max’s skinny wrists, looking over his head at the others, saying, “We got to get him to the police station. Where his parents at? Where they at?” Max thought he repeated the words
No
and
Wait
, but he was so overpowered by her jerking his wrists around that he couldn’t be sure if he spoke the words or just mouthed them. The Yangs protested with their thin voices but were smothered between taller people who chattered excitedly. Max spotted the top of Coach Tim’s San Antonio Spurs cap. He just loomed there, watching. Kelly was far behind Tim, still in Nadine and Rodney’s yard. Was this really happening? Were the Yangs the only people willing to help Max and his father? And couldn’t Max do anything other than get handled by this hysterical woman?