Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (16 page)

He no longer existed in that comfortable middle distance at school. His theory about it had been all wrong. He’d gotten away with it before because he was beautiful. Of course, he hadn’t appreciated how clean and pleasant-looking he was back then. Now he felt like a bother, a sore. He felt grotesque. Cynicism edged into his worldview, and he turned unsmiling.

Nadine’s beauty became unbearable. Every time he saw her, he fell more deeply in love. He cherished that moment they had cried together, and the time they’d gotten drunk, and the physical contact that he was remorseful about but also regularly turned on by. The dream of them in that mattress-lined room was embellished upon and made more vivid by his memory. It was the guiltiest and most exciting material to masturbate to. She had very short-term boyfriends that he’d spot once or twice and then never again. After school, he visited her whenever he could. Sometimes she came back from work at ten in the morning after a night shift, other times at five or eight or ten in the evening.

At first he nearly begged her to give him yard work to do or to let him clean her house or wash her car. He accepted money for these little jobs when she threatened to refuse his continued help if he didn’t. She watched him mow the lawn, following him, mildly suspicious of his motives, but maybe more tickled and curious than anything. He occasionally caught his father
spying on them from the living room window, ducking out of sight when Max looked in his direction.

Things had been uncomfortable since his father had kicked Nadine out of the house that day. Rasheed’s attempt at clearing the air came in the form of enthusiasm about banal things: “It’s really a warm day today!” Or leaving uncharacteristic notes:
Max!!! Thank you for getting more OJ! I was so happy in finding the fresh carton this morning! What a way to start the day!!!
He even drew smiley faces on some of them. If Max didn’t know any better, he’d have taken this as sarcasm or passive-aggressiveness, but really it was Rasheed’s inability to acknowledge that something had been strangling their relationship from the moment he’d disrespected Nadine. It was then that Max had begun to question how he and his father operated. He realized that—aside from when he’d been told of his mother’s death, under cover of the dark tree house—they had never spoken honestly and directly to each other. In consequence Max took a step back. With every subsequent step back, seeing Rasheed still not make any attempt at a personal conversation, Max further realized he’d actually never known his father well at all. He had just been accustomed to him. Knowing what his favorite dish was or how he liked his ear hairs cut didn’t mean he really understood the man.

Max intrigued Nadine. She asked him a lot of questions about his interests, subjects he liked at school, books and art and music that appealed to him, sports and friends. He’d never enjoyed conversing with someone as much as he did with her. Her company energized him. At first he responded to her questions with an attractive version of himself in which he had a few close friends, loved literature (listing names of authors he’d heard of but whose first names he didn’t know: Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, Austen), and had a fascination with revolutionaries, left over from the days of Kelly’s documentaries. At school, he
followed the trend of embracing hip-hop, and liked the socially conscious stuff best, from Gil Scott-Heron to Arrested Development to Black Star. He listed off the social causes he was interested in, as rapped about by KRS-One, the Roots, and Common. She smirked in a way he dreamed was flirtation.

He’d always been captivated by stories of the brave and small up against the big and unfair, like Robin Hood or the Three Musketeers, and these rappers’ objections to real-life inequalities were a continuation of this, an insight into the war of adulthood he feared he’d never be ready for. He’d gone from letting documentaries make him cringe at the world to bobbing his head along with those speaking out to change it. Even with their many words, hip-hop lyrics remained surprisingly generalist, like those of most songs, leaving room for anyone to latch their angst to them and momentarily transform it into an experience of heroism. Investing unanchored adolescent frustrations in these rappers’ discontentment gave him a new confidence. Their anger was convincing, and he wondered for the first time if this anger could belong to him too.

He read the first and most of the last chapter of a book on Che Guevara, and developed a similar rapport with Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Huey P. Newton. He loved the Zapatistas, because they were angry about some form of tyranny that pissed him off too. If it had to do with the underprivileged and combatting persecution, he privately threw his fist in the air in support. It was the fantasy of standing up against something much bigger than yourself that infatuated Max. Courage of this magnitude bewildered and enthralled him.

Nadine was roused by questions of social justice too, though not with the same fervor she had for literary fiction and music. It was an addiction; she put on an album and dropped into her
fictions right when she got home from work. She lent Max books and music and told him he didn’t need to think up a job every time he wanted to come over. It took him a while to realize that she actually liked the insecure, confused Max, and he didn’t need to pretend he had a rich life of friends and sports outside of her. He studied the books and music she gave him, and they talked at length about his findings and reactions. Over four years, she passed down a cultural education that his time in the public school system couldn’t compete with.

She prepared unlikely combinations, books and music that had nothing in particular to do with one another, and told him to try them out. That was how she said it: “Here, try these out.” Invariably one musician and one author at a time, she took creative license by marrying people like

RICHARD WRIGHT TO KEITH JARRETT, KEN KESEY TO AL GREEN, W. E. B DU BOIS TO LED ZEPPELIN, JIM HARRISON TO APHEX TWIN, BARRY HANNAH TO THE FUGEES, RAYMOND CARVER TO TALK TALK, KURT VONNEGUT JR. TO NINA SIMONE, SAUL BELLOW TO BAHAMADIA, OSCAR WILDE TO NICK DRAKE, DON DELILLO TO ANN PEEBLES, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD TO BOB MARLEY, FRANZ KAFKA TO DAVID BOWIE, TRUMAN CAPOTE TO CHUCK BERRY, ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN TO RADIOHEAD, BORIS VIAN TO THE TALKING HEADS, DONALD BARTHELME TO NIRVANA, MAYA ANGELOU TO BELLE AND SEBASTIAN, DENIS JOHNSON TO BILL WITHERS, VLADIMIR NABOKOV TO PINK FLOYD, ALBERT CAMUS TO THE GRATEFUL DEAD, JOAN DIDION TO SMOG, FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO STEVIE WONDER, JAMES BALDWIN TO DJ SHADOW, AMIRI BARAKA TO ANDREW BIRD, TOBIAS WOLFF TO PJ HARVEY, ALICE WALKER TO LOU REED, JENNIFER EGAN TO SHARON JONES, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE TO SEU JORGE, LANGSTON HUGHES TO PHILIP GLASS, JAMAICA KINCAID TO RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, SUSAN SONTAG TO MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO, JOHN CHEEVER TO CAT STEVENS, OCTAVIA BUTLER TO JONI MITCHELL, JIM CRACE TO CURTIS MAYFIELD, LYDIA DAVIS TO THE POLICE, CARSON MCCULLERS TO JAMES BROWN, HERMAN HESSE TO JEFF BUCKLEY, MILAN KUNDERA TO THE WU-TANG CLAN, WALKER PERCY TO PAUL SIMON, JAY MCINERNEY TO D’ANGELO, ALLAN GURGANUS TO MILES DAVIS, JONATHAN FRANZEN TO THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, J. D. SALINGER TO JUDY CLAY, MARK TWAIN TO THE CLASH, D. H. LAWRENCE
TO CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL, ROMAIN GARY TO A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, IVAN TURGENEV TO YO-YO MA, MARGARET ATWOOD TO CAN, EUGÈNE IONESCO TO DEAD PREZ, DOSTOYEVSKY TO BALLAKÉ SISSOKO, GEORGE SAUNDERS TO BRIAN ENO, ARUNDHATI ROY TO JUANA MOLINA, HARUKI MURAKAMI TO SISTER NANCY, ETHAN CANIN TO ANI DIFRANCO, TONI MORRISON TO BOOMBAPTIST, BARBARA KINGSOLVER TO NEU!, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TO PATTI SMITH, ALEXANDRE DUMAS TO CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG, WILLIAM GOLDING TO FIONA APPLE, GUSTAVE FLAUBERT TO IBRAHIM MAALOUF, HARPER LEE TO R.E.M., HOMER TO TUNNG, KATE ATKINSON TO TEARS FOR FEARS, NIKOLAI GOGOL TO CHILLY GONZALES, SINCLAIR LEWIS TO ERYKAH BADU, DEBORAH EISENBERG TO THE VIOLENT FEMMES, CLAUDIA RANKINE TO THE SILVER JEWS, RALPH ELLISON TO DUSTY SPRINGFIELD, KNUT HAMSUN TO RJD2, DONNA TARTT TO GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR, RAINER MARIA RILKE TO OUTKAST, GUY DE MAUPASSANT TO SIMPLE MINDS, DEBORAH LEVY TO MAZZY STAR, ROBERT STONE TO WENDY RENE, EMMANUEL CARRÈRE TO GLADYS KNIGHT, STEPHANIE VAUGHN TO MAVIS STAPLES, SALMAN RUSHDIE TO AESOP ROCK, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS TO TINA TURNER …

Despite Nadine’s demanding career and active dating life, she burned through books at an astonishing speed. Max read two to three novels a week from cover to cover now too, trying to keep up with her. He evolved into a new person with every set of artists she passed his way. His inner monologue mimicked narrators from novels, and his visceral responses to the music affected the way he held his body.

He developed an unsneering skepticism that gave him aplomb and a sense of purpose, as if he had a duty to investigate humanity, if only to report it to Nadine. He read the newspaper and was hypnotized by everything outside his small reality at home. How much bigger life was than he’d ever thought!

Oddly, the two areas to which his new interrogative drive did not apply were Rasheed and Lebanon. He avoided topics about Arabs in the news or in literature because it was excessively complicated and thus boring, but perhaps more than that, because it was in step with his vast distancing from his father. Max treated Rasheed as separate from this big new world he’d
been learning about. He did his best to put aside the guilt and anger that budded inside him, and to fade his father out of his daily awareness.

Rasheed had gone into some sort of hiding, growing very old very quickly. His life of working and watching TV, and the way he had crawled back to Coach Tim because he needed someone to get drunk with, took on a piteousness that Max felt in his gut like a tangerine-size ball sitting on his stomach.

Max was happy to follow Nadine around as she tied up odds and ends, to go to the grocery store with her, or to listen to her talk about her day. They cooked and bounced ideas off each other—daily observations, pictures that popped into their heads, strong feelings at random moments, questions—in a way he’d never known to be appropriate or possible in human communication.

They talked about small things too, like how miso soup tasted like tears. They made up Italian words, saying they were
fatiguando
or that they were thinking about becoming
vegetariano
(which actually turned out to be the real Italian word for vegetarian). They questioned why people spoke of weak chins but never of weak noses or brows. They fantasized about giving anonymous letters to strangers, puzzling compliments or aphorisms that would make the day memorable for said stranger: “Your knees match your hands exquisitely”; “You were not put on this earth to explain yourself”; “You have the power of the Jupiter behind your skin”; “Patience isn’t stealing all your time.” They discussed why they didn’t have the courage to actually give these notes. Did that mean they were more fearful than generous? Or were they just worried the receiver would suspect ridicule?

She exploded any expectations he could have had about a doctor’s way of thinking. Not so calculated or scientifically minded at all, at least, not with him. She had a general confusion about being alive, about her unavoidable loop of happiness
and self-destruction (which Max believed was what led her to someone like Rodney, and other men who were nowhere near good enough), and about how she rarely felt like one person, instead feeling like a massive crowd pulling omnidirectionally from the inside. It was Max’s first real friendship.

Danny Danesh’s status had crumbled down to the ruins of an ancient empire. Having only one arm mattered in high school, because girls mattered a whole lot more. The number of kids had multiplied by five, and he was not the best basketball player by any stretch of the imagination, nor the most rebellious or daring or smart, or even the best wielder of gay jokes. His arrogance was considered unbefitting a one-armed boy, and his old entourage dissipated into the sea of other cliques. Max had seen girls exchange looks of laughing disgust behind Danny’s back while pointing at the nubs of his missing arm, and their male counterparts tucked their arms inside their T-shirts to mock him too.

For a short while in their freshman year, Max had something that verged on companionship with Danesh. They found themselves eating lunch together most days. Since Max had no one else to talk to, he confided in Danesh about his feelings for his older neighbor, and tried out his analyses of the music and literature she assigned on him. Usually Danesh didn’t have much to say in response. He waited for his turn to talk about the old days, back in middle school, reminiscing about all his fabulous pranks, and sometimes said nasty things about his old friends.

But one time, after Max had mentioned Nadine, Danny asked, “What does your mom think about this lady?”

“I don’t have a mom.”

“No shit. Really? Me neither.” Danny seemed pleased by this point in common, and Max felt a deepened connection too.
How had he never known this about Danny? “Well,” Danny went on, “I mean, I have a stepmom, but my real mom died when I was a baby. I guess she was nursing me when she croaked. My dad found me on her boob, and she was all cold. That’s why he hates me so much. He thinks I like sucked the life out of her or something. And now that faggot can’t get over the fact that I’m stronger than his ass. I have been for, like, five years now. Yeah. Last night he tried to twist my arm behind my back when I told him to stop talking to my stepmom like he does. She’s cool as shit.”

Max wasn’t sure if Danny meant this literally. “Like, twisted your arm physically?”

Danesh blinked at him quickly. “Why are you so gay? Yeah, physically. He tried to pin my arm against me, and I swiveled right out of that shit and slammed my fist into his throat and told him I’d fuck him up for real next time.” He took a heaping spoonful of Spanish rice and pork.

Coach Tim had told Max long ago that Danny’s father was seriously bad news—had some kind of mental health issues and was abusive. Back then, Max admired even this information about Danny. Despite Max’s avoidance of trouble and challenge, he believed that people with big problems had more meaningful lives.

But then he actually met Danny’s father. He’d shown up to one of their basketball games. He had a sausage-shaped torso, a severe underbite, and a smashed pug nose. It was a wonder he’d helped create such a good-looking son. Danny played belligerently that game and fouled out. At this Mr. Danesh applauded slowly and sarcastically as he walked off the stands, circled the court, and approached the bench. Danny left the building, pretending not to see or hear his father clapping. Mr. Danesh
took Danny’s seat on the bench. Max was the only other player sitting; the others hopped up and down with the momentum of the game, neck and neck with St. James Catholic. Coach Tim gave Mr. Danesh a quick head nod and a glare that meant,
You’d better behave
. Mr. Danesh stared at the floor for a while. His hands pulled his face back and open into an eerie pumpkin-grin, his teeth the texture of dried corn husks.