Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (13 page)

“Yeah.”

“You will be fourteen someday.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I will tell you about something. There are parts you don’t know about.” Of course, Max didn’t know most of the parts.

“Yes.” Max sat up and rested his back against the wall under the tiny window, anxious for the story to seize him. He felt it could develop his life into something clear and important.

“Okay. But do you know why I am telling you this?”

“Because—”

“No. Because I don’t ever want to have to speak it again.”

“Okay.”

“All right. Your mother and I lived in Ras Beirut,” he started. “We were best friends. We grew up together. She was a sunshine, you know. She studied political science at AUB and was very smart, very radiant, very brave. Everyone in West Beirut loved her. We made a baby, this was you, and she loved it very much.” He said the word
loved
as if it choked him.

“Where did you two meet, in a class?” Max asked.

“This is not the story I am telling now.”

“Okay.”

“In the beginning of the war,” he continued, “we lived in my parents’ home. My father was a dentist, you see. I helped him when I wasn’t at school, and then assisted him full time when I graduated.”

“I thought you studied economics.”

“I did. My father,” he said with a declarative finger pointing at the ceiling, “Muhammad Imad el din Boulos, was the most famous dentist in Ras Beirut. Everyone knew him. We lived in a very nice building—al-Nada building—very near to AUB. In less than five years, the people of this building—the rich people, the journalist people, the Saudis and Gulfies—fled away because of the war.

“My father would not leave the country. He said, Why should we be chased by the idiots running around with guns, and so on and so on. The apartment was also my father’s dentist office, and he continued to receive patients in our home on the sixth
floor. He thought the war was about to end, always sure that in a week or two it would be ending.

“Refugees, homeless people, and snipers took over the empty apartments.” Rasheed’s eyes scanned the black ceiling. They shone and swept like flashlights whenever he got immersed in a story, as if seeing it play out in front of him. “We heard the shooting and the bombing often. The top apartment of the building had a swimming pool on the roof. When the rich family left that apartment, it transformed into a bordello.”

“A what?”

“Where prostitutes work. We heard the parties they had with different militia until the early morning. One day a rocket went through our window, over the dentist chair—with a patient there—and out the other window. This is when my mother and your mother took you in the bathtub and put cooking pots on their heads.

“There was one pistol in the house, and your mother kept it in the tub in case she needed to protect you from any bad people.” He looked at Max. “Nothing mattered to her but you.”

“And you too, right?”

“Yes, all right, me too,” Rasheed said. “You never cried. We worried you might be a deaf child. Even when that missile flew through the living room and over the chair you did not cry.

“Sometimes I left the apartment and walked up and down the stairs of the building with you in my arms, to let your mother and my mother rest, and so on and so on. Eleven floors, up and down, maybe two or three times per day. You loved these walks too much.”

He raised his hands in front of him and studied them with the horrified gaze of someone who’d strangled an innocent person. Why did he look so guilty? He smelled like an intensified version of himself: musk and sawdust. “We lived with maybe fifteen
others in the apartment at a time. Grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends that had no more home. We had many friends. Even friends of friends we didn’t know very well. Different militia would also come and get their teeth checked. In the middle of the war. Imagine. They respected these appointments. Not always, but yes, mostly always.”

“They paid your father?”

“No. My poor father, not so many paid him for his services. And sometimes the militiamen did surprise us, men with guns who wanted their teeth cleaned early because they were moving to another part of the city or something. Some of them kept on masks that they lifted past their mouths. But because we lived in Ras Beirut, these were all leftist Muslim groups that fought for the same side. The city was divided in this way. It did not feel very risky to have different militiamen coming and going. We knew them from before. These were the same boys I went to grade school with. They were taxi drivers or fruit vendors or concierges in the neighborhood. They came in to check for the cavities or maybe to make the gums stop hurting.

“Your mother and I decided we had to leave this place. She wanted to take you away and join with her parents in Paris. They had left years before. All she cared for was getting you to safety. You were the center of her life, you see? And now she said, Enough is enough, we must leave this bathtub, we must leave Beirut. We must leave this crazy country.” He swallowed at the height of a big breath. Max recognized this as a technique to overcome a lump in the throat. “During a pause in the fighting—there was a pause for two hours every day so people could do their food shopping, and so on and so on—I walked to an MEA travel agency.”

“The fighting stopped? Like, for lunch?”

“Yes. Why not? There were usually no mortars during these pauses, and I was lucky because the phone lines were working,
so the MEA agent sent a telex to the airline, and like this we had a flight to Paris the next day. I was very excited to tell your mother. We had to pray that there would be no big problems before leaving. But on the walk back, two boys with guns took me into the parking garage underneath our building.”

Max sat up straighter. “What did they want?” he asked, guessing one of these two was the robber who would kill his mother and the others later in the story.

Rasheed didn’t answer for a while. He turned and a bit more moonlight hit his face. The grooves at the corner of his eye looked like a fan of spears. “They were very confused boys. It was strange that two rightist Christians would dare be in the middle of Ras Beirut like this. They wore big crucifixes. Maybe it was some kind of suicide mission, or maybe they wanted to prove something to their leaders. I don’t know. Anyway, they were disguised as poor civilians, and frightened and very nervous, and so young. Maybe fifteen or sixteen years old only. They said to me, ‘We know Abdul al-Masri has made an appointment to get his teeth cleaned. Tell us when he is coming.’ They were talking about some leader in the local Mourabitoun militia. I said I did not know when Abdul al-Masri had an appointment—I did not even know who that man was—but if he is an important man, he will not come to our office, he will send for my father. They said they still wanted to know when was his appointment. I told them, ‘Okay, let me go upstairs and check and I will come back to tell you.’ They said, ‘No, we must come up with you and stay until Abdul al-Masri comes.’ I said, ‘Do not do this. Everyone will know you are not my friends.’ But they told me this was not my choice.”

“How did they know that this guy had an appointment?” Max said.

“Someone who stayed with us must have sold the information, or told another person who told another person. So I took
them upstairs and introduced these boys as friends and said they will stay with us for some days before moving on and trying to make it to Syria. Everyone knew this was not true, and became very afraid that these rude boys now lived with us. One of them never left my side, and the other stood always with my father. They studied the appointment book and saw that the man they were looking for was scheduled to get a root canal in two weeks. The boys became very loud and angry with my father because they wanted him to explain how he knew Abdul al-Masri needed a root canal. It was true, it is unbelievable that Abdul al-Masri knew by himself that he needed this operation and made an appointment for two weeks later.”

“So how—”

“It means my father had looked inside Abdul al-Masri’s mouth before. Maybe he had come in dressed as a layperson or maybe my father went and visited him one day during a truce, we can never always learn the true story.

“The rude boys didn’t trust my father and decided to stay two weeks until the appointment. We had the flight the next day and I could not even go into the bathroom and be alone to tell your mother about this. I didn’t want to tell these boys we were leaving. I couldn’t know what this would make them do, if they would become angry, or want to take the tickets or money or what. They became more and more paranoid.

“I went into the bathroom and your mother asked the boy that followed me to leave, and when he said no, she stood up in the tub with you in her arms, and the cooking pot on her head, and looked him in the eye. She said he should be ashamed of himself, not even allowing a family to have a few moments to be alone. The boy pointed his gun at her. I was so afraid your mother would take out her pistol she had in the back of her pajamas.”

“Where was your mother?”

“My mother? She was with my father then. I don’t know. But, thank God, your mother had such a power in her look that she didn’t need any pistol and the boy lowered his gun back down and left the bathroom to give us the moment alone. I told her about the tickets and she said we would go. We would sneak out in the night and go. No problem. Nothing can stop us.”

A long pause. “After, I took you on a walk up and down the stairs, with the boy always walking behind us. It is then that we heard the gunfire. We ran back up to the sixth floor.

“In the hall I hid behind a corner and saw men, maybe Abdul al-Masri’s men, shooting into our apartment. Probably someone told them that the boys were staying with us. The boy behind us ran toward the men and was shot down immediately. We stayed behind the corner and I heard your mother scream and shoot all the bullets from that pistol. She had no fear in her scream. Only strength. She hit two of the men. They shot back. I held your ears against me and I prayed for I don’t know what: that your mother survived, my sisters, my father, my brothers, my cousins, my grandparents, my friends, and so on and so on. And then there was no more scream, or any noises from inside the apartment. We waited until the men left. When we went inside there was nothing.”

He stopped there.

“Nothing?”

His voice knotted up again. “What do you want me to describe here, huh?”

Max superimposed images from the Lebanese civil war documentary onto this story, imagining a dead boy from the Sabra and Shatila massacre as the boy who ran up to the sixth floor with Rasheed. That boy who launched himself into death as Max’s mother emptied her pistol out, screaming. The wounds in the boy’s stomach and neck grew more vividly in the playback of Max’s memory, gaining more color, puckering and moving like an aquatic plant, and threatening to stink.

Max wondered why his father had once called her murderer—or, now, murderers—a robber. None of these characters seemed like robbers. Rasheed knew the difference between the words
robber
and
militiaman
. It couldn’t have been carelessness. No, Max rationalized that he’d used the word
robber
at the beginning of the summer because he wasn’t ready to share the real story with his son. And now he trusted Max with the true version. There was always a reason behind the pace at which Rasheed revealed information. If this is what Kelly had meant about his father lying about his mother, than she was even more ridiculous than he’d thought.

“I brought you up to the bordello, and we stayed with the ladies there. It was then that you started crying. They let us sleep in the pool shed. It was small, almost like this.” He knocked the floor of the tree house with the butt of his palm. “And you screamed, always a horrible scream, until it was time to take the plane. You screamed for two days. Then we went to Paris.”

“When did we come here?”

“Short time after. I told your mother’s parents the story, and they said we could not stay with them. They were too angry with me. They bought us plane tickets for America and gave me some money to start this life here.”

“But they don’t still live there,” Max said.

“No, they don’t live anywhere. They died of old age very young.”

Max’s trust renewed itself fully. And now more than ever did he believe his father deserved to know the truth about Rodney, and all the awful things Kelly had said. It was the perfect time to say it. Rasheed had just opened up to him in an unprecedented way. He should confess the terrible thing he had done with her that night too. But he didn’t. He just let the pitch silence of the tree house hold it all in. He wasn’t yet strong enough to
break his father’s heart, or maybe he was starting to understand that Rasheed wasn’t strong enough to have his heart broken.

He lay in bed the next morning, his father already at work, when he heard the front door crash shut. Kelly had left a note on the kitchen table:
Too bad it worked out this way. Rodney and I left for good. —K

When Rasheed came home he stayed seated at the table. His skin and eyes looked dehydrated. His cheeks were a deflated, craggy, dried-up mess, like a turtle’s.

He said, “I’m sorry, Max. She’s gone now.”

“I know, Dad.” Max had the urge to say,
And thank God, it’s about time.
The astonishing thing about it all was how Rasheed didn’t understand that she had never cared about them. How could he have been so blind? So stupid? Maybe he’d seen Kelly as a symbol of something, her actual personality being irrelevant. Maybe she represented hope, simply by being a woman willing to live in their house, of distracting him from the guilt of surviving that day in Beirut so many years ago. But how could a man three times Max’s age believe that any woman would do? That one was as good as another? When his father put his head in the crook of his arm and his shoulders shuddered, Max felt his own knees about to buckle. He scolded himself. Rasheed should be as blind as he needed. Lying to one’s self is a basic right. A necessary tool for survival.

The following day, Rasheed didn’t get out of bed for work. Max peeked into his room and saw him lying on top of his covers wearing last night’s clothes. He took off his father’s shoes and put a blanket on him, hearing him mumble that he must have caught some flu virus and needed a little rest. He didn’t get up for three days except to go to the bathroom. This flu cost him his night shifts at the diner. Max answered the phone calls
from his boss, first passing on the warnings and then that they were letting him go. Rasheed didn’t respond to any of the news.