Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (2 page)

Max had been imitating Danny’s trademark stutter from time to time at home, but his father remained unimpressed. The times Rasheed had seen Danny Danesh when he came to pick Max up from school, he’d guffawed at the boy. He disliked hotshots and said Danny looked like a hoodrat. But Max didn’t believe his father knew what a hoodrat was; he’d also heard him use the term to describe their neighbor, Mrs. Waltzen, an ancient woman who stuffed their mailbox with pamphlets about the word of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

At the Yangs’ it smelled of sauna wood, rosewater, and mothballs. They had a greenhouse roof that covered half of their kitchen and all of the adjoining living room, filled with hundreds of extraterrestrial-looking plants and bright flowers. Max was wearing gray sweatpants and an oversize beige T-shirt, and his father sported jean shorts and a white tank top. Vines of hair spiraled up Rasheed’s neck and across his back, accumulating into a little black fire on each shoulder. He was proud of his hairiness. When they swam at the Y, he sometimes floated on his back and announced to his own submerged chest, “It is like a burned omelet!” and laughed, turning his head from side to side to see who enjoyed his very funny comment.

A wall of about twenty Asian men and women surrounded a flower sitting on a stool. They turned to briefly register Max and his father’s arrival.

Rasheed called out, “Audi, fucks.” Though such moments embarrassed Max, it never occurred to him to correct his father. Rasheed was a fixed entity, an unchanging, finished, permanent person, and the thought of teaching him anything was as unthinkable as training a turtle to sing. Turtles cannot sing and fathers cannot change. Neither fact demands alteration.

The men wore gray or navy suits and the women bright floral-patterned dresses and a lot of powder on their faces. Standing out two heads taller than everyone was Max’s basketball coach: Coach Tim. Max went up to him and received a low five.

“Getting a little shaggy there, Maxie,” Coach said, tussling Max’s thick bowl of black hair. Max’s eyelashes, long and womanly as a camel’s, twitched his bangs when he blinked. Tim grabbed Rasheed’s hand like an old war buddy, and with a lot of emotion, said, “What’s ragin’, Cajun?” and the two of them cantered off to whisper intensely in the corner.

They were a funny pair, Coach Tim and Rasheed—Tim, a broad-shouldered, reddish, balding man who hardly ever took off his San Antonio Spurs cap (in homage to where he’d lived most of his life); and Rasheed, a five-foot-five paunch-bellied man with twiggy arms, a scimitar of a nose, a weak chin, brown eyes that looked like little coffee beans, a hairline that started a quarter of the way down his forehead, and an easy laugh. Rasheed watched a lot of baseball with Tim at the house but never remembered the games. He didn’t know the players’ names or what cities teams came from or even who’d won. Max knew that baseball was like gazing at a bonfire for his father, a wonderfully tranquil and warm time to get drawn into the flickering light, and dream. Anytime this favorite American sport of
his came up in conversation, he got a faraway look in his eye and said, “Yes. There is a beautiful game.”

Since Tim’s wife had left him four years earlier, Rasheed spent a lot of time at his house. They drank over there frequently—to lift Tim’s spirits, as Rasheed put it. Max wasn’t invited to these therapy sessions.

Max noticed a pretty Asian girl, maybe eleven years old, peeking around a woman’s shoulder. The girl was slipped inside a rich orange dress, lips painted a dazzling gloss. She took one shimmering step toward him, showing her whole body now. She stood with the composure of a magazine model, had a mod haircut and pearl earrings. A little woman. Her beauty stunned him into extreme self-consciousness. He felt spotlit, exposed, and maybe insufficient. She kept a bronze leather purse taut on her shoulder, and had tight, brilliant black eyes. Such captivating eyes made him insecure about his own. His were far too big for his face. Though adults often complimented him on how pretty they were, he’d hated them ever since a boy in his class accused him of looking like a Chihuahua. When he remembered to, he’d let his heavy lids close three-quarters of the way to make them appear smaller, peering at people through the narrow slits he left open. Teachers would often ask if he was sick or sleepy.

Tim and Rasheed laughed loudly about something, and when Max looked back to see where the little woman had gone, she was right in front of him.

“Hello,” she said, flickering her mascaraed eyes.

“Hi.” He swayed back and forth, sea-legged, relaxing his lids, impatiently waiting for something else to come out of his mouth.

“You look tired. You need sugar.” She reached into her purse and offered him a giant wrapped cube of Chinese candy. He
thanked her by bowing his head, overplaying some gentleman’s role he’d just now invented. He blushed as he tried to work the wrapper off the candy. Picking it open took all his concentration. She giggled and said, “Here,” bringing out another from her purse and quickly unwrapping it with her tiny polished nails. The giant cube was apricot colored. While Max put that one in his mouth and nodded to express how good it tasted, she began unpeeling the one he’d been holding. She smiled at his chewing like a mother watching her infant eat.

Mr. Yang called out, “Okay, excuse me, normally it may bloom in exactly one minute.” Tim could be heard from across the room, whispering loudly, “This is so freaking awesome,” to Rasheed, putting an arm around him for a rapid side-hug.

Mr. Yang turned toward the tripoded camera and gave a speedy discourse in Mandarin, probably a brief history of the flower and of what was to come. Max saw the flower through cracks made by the suits and dresses rocking side to side like buoys. It sat in a ceramic pot on the high stool between Mr. Yang and the camcorder. It was the size of a small hand, with its hairy green fingertips touching, bursting at the seams.

The little woman gave Max a third cube. He accepted it, sucking and chewing and swallowing back saliva while the two of them laughed together with their eyes, but these taffies weren’t getting broken down at all. Managing the enormous wad exhausted his tongue.

Robby descended the stairs naked and waved—“Hi!”—to all the guests. Other than the little woman, most stayed faithfully glued to the flower, not allowing Robby to take priority on this big day. Max had seen Robby naked so many times, he preferred to pore over the little woman’s profile, trying to ball up the taffy in his mouth and push it into his cheek so he could get a word out. He’d thought of something to say now.
Where ya from?
That’s a good starter question. But she was unwrapping another
taffy. Mechanically now, still staring at Robby, she handed it to Max. It didn’t occur to him to decline, and he added it to the giant mass.

Mrs. Yang draped a quilt around Robby and walked him down so he could join everyone for the main event. She rubbed his back in big circles, saying something calming into his ear. His eyes shrunk, small as a mole’s, his mouth hinged open, agreeing serenely with whatever poetry she used on him. Rasheed asked Max with hand signs if he could see okay, and Tim wiggled his eyebrows at him. Max said yes with his head, praying they wouldn’t come over.

The room quieted. The little woman held back a different kind of smile. Max realized she was trying to conceal what she really wanted to do: laugh at his struggle with all this taffy stuffed in his mouth. A woman in the wall of people cried,
“Wasai!”
and they knew it had begun. The little woman became more girl-like, standing on her tiptoes, weaving to the left and then the right, until she found a gap to see through. She turned back, inviting Max to look between shoulders with her. His mouth spread wide at her thoughtfulness, and a long cord of apricot saliva poured to the white tiled floor. She slapped her mouth shut with two cupped hands to trap in her laughter. More people oohed at whatever the flower was doing. He inhaled violently out of mortification, and the ball of taffy got vacuumed into his windpipe.

It was too big. Not enough space around the ball to even cough, and breathing stopped for him. His chest and head got hot, and he knew some kind of explosion was under way. He couldn’t make a sound, his insides throbbed in a death-panicked frenzy, but on the outside he was frozen still. The little woman’s face pulsated: electric blue, violet, red, yellow. Something about his expression transformed hers into terror, her brow slanting into a roof. His lungs convulsed, pleading for relief. He
contemplated her lovely face, humiliated, wanting to apologize. He tried to smile. If only he could keep still, until the flower went through its short life, and not ruin Mr. Yang’s moment.

And then—
snap
. He dropped to the floor and thrashed, tearing at his throat. Everything clenched and released, then clenched and released again. His vision blurred so that he saw the heads crowded over him in unusually proportioned blobs, wavy, like he’d been sunk in a bathtub. His father elbowed through the guests so hard that he knocked a woman to the ground. He pulled Max up to a sitting position and whacked at his back.

A woman shouted, “I am a doctor!” but Rasheed wouldn’t entrust his son to her.

Rasheed yelled at Max, “Come on! Come on!” He understood that the hitting didn’t do any good so he slid behind him on the floor, propping Max’s back up against his chest. The crowd took a uniform step back and someone stumbled over the woman on the ground and went down too, hitting the bottom of the stool, tipping the flower toward Max. He watched the pot fall over the two people on the ground, as his father taught himself the Heimlich on him. He saw it vividly. Its fresh bruise-colored stem looked too frail for that heavy head. It was about a quarter of the way blossomed to its pink insides, like tender gums or an uncovered organ. It bordered on grotesque. The flower eyed him until the pot crashed against the white tiles. Soil sprayed up to his feet. It began wilting instantaneously, turning gray and then charcoal. His eyes felt as if they were bulging out of his head.

An overwhelming calm took him, and he went limp. Nothing left to fight. Rasheed said, “Calm it down, Max, please, breathe very slowly. Please.” His tears soaked Max’s temple. Time for Max to shut down, fireworks crackled off in his brain.

Coach Tim’s furry, red, hulking fist swung in from nowhere, punching up into Max’s ribs. The ball of taffy popped out like
a glistening planet, spinning away in a slow arc. It grazed a pant leg and then met with the floor, picking up a ring of dirt as it rolled past the stool and all the way to the opposite wall. At Max’s first goose-honking breath—announcing
I am here. I am alive
—he kept his eye on the orange ball and couldn’t believe how much smaller it was than he’d imagined.

Back home, an hour after Coach Tim had saved Max’s life, Rasheed stayed glued to his son, staring with a frantic love that looked a lot like misery. He appeared drained, running off pure adrenaline, as though worry had caused his body to click over into survival mode, fighting for its life against the nightmare of losing his boy. He grabbed Max by the arm and rolled the muscles and tendons together like electrical cords, making sure his son was solid and animate. While Max poured a glass of OJ in the kitchen, Rasheed ripped him away from the counter, gripping him by the back of his neck, and plunged his nose into Max’s hair, inhaling loudly. “Dad!” Max yelled, having almost knocked over his drink. Rasheed followed him around the house like a starved zombie.

Max escaped to his room and fell asleep in Rocket’s bed with her. A tremendous fatigue had piled in after touching his mortality. When he woke up, Rasheed sat on Max’s bed, still looking
like an illness ate away at him. He presented two plates of peas and tiny burned hamburgers and a pool of ketchup. Max rubbed his eyes and breathed in the dinner, suspecting nothing had been salted or spiced. Rasheed said Coach Tim and the Yangs had stopped by. Mr. Yang brought a baby cactus for Max that looked like a green bump in a pot. He also gave Rasheed his business card to pass on to him. The card read
MR. YANG
: 1 (856) 567–5308.

Rasheed handed it to Max. “For emergencies.”

“But I know this number.” He’d had the Yangs’ home line memorized since he was five.

“It is in case you forget during the emergency.”

“But they still live next door, right?” He feared he’d been asleep for months.

Rasheed clucked his tongue to end the conversation.

He usually told Max wonderful stories, but tonight he narrated a joyless episode of a series he’d invented about a guy named Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother. The Man-Dog was a naked guy on a leash, behaving like a dog. Rasheed had originally introduced them as a man named Kip and this other man, Doug, but after Max fell into a fit of giggles at the misheard version, Rasheed decided to go forth with the Man-Dog character, and this probably allowed him to get a lot wilder with the stories than he would have otherwise. Kip and the Man-Dog started off by doing mundane things like going grocery shopping or to the movies, but then something fantastical would happen: they might get surrounded by incandescent lizard-men or find themselves on a meteor where the Man-Dog needed to dig and hollow out its center so that it gravitated to the earth as softly as a piece of popcorn. It turned into a joke for Rasheed to change the Man-Dog’s name every time, from Sam to Brandon to Dylan to Patrick and a few others. Max pretended to be outraged by this name switching and told him it didn’t match the name he’d used
the time before, and Rasheed claimed Max was the one forgetting. This evening, Kip and the Man-Dog sat in a classroom. The Man-Dog inexplicably had magical earlobes, and flung them out and cracked his teacher’s butt while she wrote something on the chalkboard. Rasheed mimed the whip of the earlobe by snapping his fingers in an uncomfortably serious way.

After they’d finished eating, Max fake-slept. Though he never would have said so, he felt like being alone. When his father finally left, he counted backward from one hundred before sneaking out to his tree house. Once up there, he thought of that final rush of peace that blew into his body at the Yangs’, like he was death’s balloon. He stuck his head out the little window and folded his waist over the ledge, putting his weight on his abdomen. As he tipped forward, his feet got lighter and lifted off the ground. If he let himself go much farther, his back half would pick up speed and fling him upside down. He’d slip out and fall on his head. He leaned forward anyway, and it happened just as he’d anticipated. All at once. He heard himself make a helpless karate-man sound,
hi ya
, as his legs flipped up and tried to shoot over his back. His calves caught the inside wall above the window, toes pressing hard against the ceiling, hands squeezing the ledge, blood swelling the brain. His black hair hung straight down. A weightlessness cleaned out his chest as he imagined his skull cracking open and, for some reason, envisioned only sand spilling out. He saw a flash of his father and Coach Tim, Rocket, his bedroom, his school, the Yangs, and again, his father, ruined. Rocket traipsed out of the house and sat on the grass under him, yawning up at the top of his head. He didn’t want to die, oh God, he didn’t want to die. Of course, all it required was for him to push back on his calves and lower himself. And that’s what he did.