Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (20 page)

He filled out the forms, got his picture taken, paid for the passport to be expedited, and waited for it to arrive in the mail without telling anyone what he was up to. Enduring Nadine’s inattention and noticing his father’s absence more than usual felt like the experience of a brave soldier. It took a lot of
self-restraint to resist telling Nadine he was leaving. The thought of excluding her empowered him, and though he wanted to revel in her reaction now, he knew the exclusion would be more complete, more effective, if he just left—that is, if she even noticed. Maybe he wouldn’t ever come back. Maybe he’d move in with his mother and live happily in Lebanon. Forget all these other people.

There was another reason not to confide in Nadine about the trip: She’d talk him out of it, or offer a more logical way to go about getting in contact with his mother. He didn’t want that. Didn’t want to be logical. The only great part about his plan was that it was crazy. The old him would have tried to find his mother’s phone number, but at this point it would require asking his father for help, giving him power, and that was out of the question.

Through his stinging confusion—fantasies of committing violence against his father and of telling Nadine off, explaining that he didn’t need her and could disappear as easily as that—he had a growing determination to find his mom. He became increasingly convinced that this was not just about running from Nadine and Rasheed. His mortality had started haunting him the summer he’d choked on that taffy, when he’d nearly flung himself out the tree house window, when Kelly’s documentaries had penetrated his censored world view, when he’d spent hundreds of practice hours in the awful tree house, preparing for the unbelievable certainty that we die, that we stop and others carry on. The woman with the pot on her head was the mascot for this certainty. She was the symbol of death, not an individual who had died. And now she had miraculously outdone death, crossed over to the side of living, become a real person who’d been looking for him. It was nothing short of an otherworldly phenomenon. She would help him transcend all his greatest fears. She was the answer to all the questions and
cravings he’d never articulated or even been fully conscious of. If she had once inspired a prideful sadness in Max when dead, she now instilled a prideful hope.

Samira Jabbir became the point of everything. And it is when you think you’ve discovered the point of everything that you are truly blind.

He vomited while landing in Beirut in the middle of the night. The inside of Rafic Hariri International Airport looked like a carless parking garage with a baggage claim, an immigration desk, and a few bored or sleepy soldiers pacing about with machine guns, smoking cigarettes. When he had boarded the plane in New Jersey, and as he stared out the window during takeoff, he felt exceedingly proud of this romantic jump toward the unknown. Now in this dingy airport, he experienced a distinct lack of reward. There was no one here to receive him and tell him what a brave thing he had done. He was very much on his own. He told the immigration officer chewing a cigar that he’d come to visit family. The man glared at him awhile before telling him to write down what address he’d be staying at on his customs form. Max wrote his mother’s name and put down the Yangs’ address, 2718 Marion Street. Without looking at it, the man threw it in a drawer, stamped his passport, and waved him on.

Max’s lungs worked to filter the water and cigarette smoke from the air. His legs felt heavy and he had to push them hard to cut through the dense humidity. The one phone he found in the airport was out of service and didn’t have a phone book. Shit, he thought. His simple and crazy plan was already coming apart. Outside, a taxi driver with one eye asked if he needed a ride. The man hobbled with a cane, his right foot landing crookedly and his knees collapsing inward with every step. It looked unnatural and agonizing. He had such dense stubble it looked as if charcoal had been smeared on his face, and it continued down his neck to connect with his chest hair. A hammer-and-sickle pendant hung from a gold chain between the lapels of his open white shirt. He opened the door for Max before limping over to the driver’s side.

He asked Max, “You want downtown?”

“I’m looking for a phone.”

The man took a cell phone out of his pocket. “Like this one?” He waved it around a little.

“Is there a way to call information here?”

“Call information?”

“Never mind. I think I need a pay phone.”

“Where you go?”

Max said, “I guess I go to Beirut,” not sure why he used broken English.

“To downtown Beirut?”

“Yes, I need to find a public phone.”

“I am agree to take you, but there is very little phones in downtown.”

The driver chain-smoked, the car jangled, and Max thought of loose screws. His nausea came back. The uncertainty of where this would all lead terrified him. All of his senses were telling him that he was far outside his element. Billboards proclaimed themselves every forty feet on both sides of the
highway: ads for watches, cigarettes, cell phones, TVs, cars, whiskey, designer clothes, hair gel, nursing assistant positions, diamond-studded hijabs. Within a few minutes the driver declared, “You are American. I am not like a normal Lebanese. I hate Lebanon. I hate God. I hate every religious and political peoples.” He checked to see what effect this had on Max and decided to go further. “I had grew up with cancers until I am age eighteen. Where was God? I am Communist people.” He lifted his pendant off his chest as if he were showing off a sixth finger, as if to say,
I am a freak and proud
. “We are very little Communists in Lebanon.”

He had a plastic cup of whiskey and Red Bull, the emptied can and bottle at Max’s feet. He noticed Max eyeing the cup and shouted over the sound of the highway that he must drink in order to stay awake all night.

“This gives me the power,” said the driver.

He asked Max for his religion, and when Max replied that he didn’t have one, the driver patted him on the shoulder and awarded him his first name: Ahmed.

“You hate God too,” Ahmed said.

Max didn’t want to disappoint him, so he said, “I don’t know, never even met the guy.” Ahmed found this hilarious and repeated it a few times, maybe practicing to recite the line to others in the future. Spittle fired through his decayed teeth and hit the backs of his hands and the steering wheel.

The sun opened its eye and shot a beam across Beirut. The city was burrowed between the Mediterranean and mountains. Aside from the colorful laundry flagging out of windows and rooftops, the buildings were the colors of abandonment: weak grays and deadened beiges. Ahmed pulled over to idle on the side of a small one-way street that cars drove both ways on, and
pointed out the phone booth before the Corniche, the seaside pedestrian walk that wrapped around Beirut. Max didn’t really want to get out. He wished he could stay with Ahmed until he found his mother. He craved direction, orders, a promise of being cared for by someone who knew the ropes. But he could feel Ahmed waiting for him to exit and was too ashamed to ask for his help—not that he knew what he’d ask for, exactly. Max paid with American dollars. Before screeching off, Ahmed wrote his phone number down on the back of the receipt for the Red Bull and whiskey, telling Max to call anytime for a pickup.

The uneven and potholed sidewalk stirred up Max’s nausea. Maybe if he didn’t feel so ill, he’d be more mesmerized by his surroundings. The phone booth smelled of rotted clothes and piss, and he remembered his tree house. There was no phone book or receiver and he shouldered his way out, as if from a burning building.

He stood back onto the irregular ground, taking a lot of deep breaths, telling himself,
This is fine, no big deal, I’m not screwed, this is all part of the great adventure.
Worst-case scenario, he’d go back to the airport and buy a ticket home. He patted his wallet through his pants every twenty steps to make sure it was still there. He was broiling in the bath of humidity and pollution, his head wheeled round and round as the sun pounded on him. The gasoline and exhaust attacked as two separately stomach-turning odors. He hadn’t eaten since the two bites he had on the plane, hadn’t slept in two days, and was intensely conscious of his parched mouth.
Oh God, what am I doing here?

He asked a young man with a soccer ball under his arm for another phone booth and was pointed in a vague direction down the Corniche. Feeling the sweat trickle down the back of his neck, he headed that way. The sun crushed his eyes even
when he closed them, the orange bleeding past his lids like through brown glass. The top of his head started cooking. Whistling, honking, and shouting crackled through the air as the city woke up. People lived here like this? Every day? He saw another phone booth across the street, but the automobiles—nearly all of them old Mercedes or dusty motorcycles that carried four and sometimes five people, holding babies or baskets of figs—were an endless stream of droning hornets, flying by with hardly an inch between them. His vision pulsated with rainbow-colored spots. An old man with a plastic bag full of fish walked into the street, forcing the cars to skid to a stop. They didn’t honk any more than they had before. The heat nearly flattened Max. He took a big lungful of the soaking air and stepped into oncoming traffic.

There was no phone book or dial tone in this second booth, and besides, it looked like a phone-card-operated system. He picked up the receiver and smashed it against the phone twice. Through the glass of the booth he saw a few barefoot children laughing at his anger. He gently rested the receiver in its cradle, drew another deep breath, and gagged slightly. He meandered back into the denser part of the city to at least find shade while he reexamined his plan. Three fat men sat in front of a tall building on white lawn chairs that seemed on the verge of crumpling under their massive bodies. He slogged over to them and asked where he might buy water. The men conferenced in Arabic for a moment, and when they reached a consensus, the one in the middle grunted and motioned for Max to follow him inside the building. The fat around the man’s eyes protruded so much it seemed like he had pits on either side of his nose with long, thick lashes growing out of them. It reminded Max of the time Danny Danesh had placed the back of a beetle against his
eyelid and held it there with a squint, the legs kicking the air in search of ground. A young woman wearing a hijab stood erect behind the front desk. Her professional smile dissolved when she registered that Max was unwell. Whatever his face was doing made her very sad. The fat man went behind the desk and reached around her to open a mini fridge. His hand came up with a magnificent, glistening bottle of water. He gave it to Max without once changing the slack expression on his orangutan-padded face. Max said thank you and the man lumbered back outside to plop down on his tired chair. The young woman watched Max chug the water. With every glug of the bottle, her smile returned a bit more. She appeared sincerely impressed, as if he’d delivered fully on the spectacle she’d been dreaming of all week.

She offered, “Another one?”

He dipped his head gratefully before tipping back the second bottle. She watched in fascination again. He felt it important to keep her interest. She looked to be about twenty, with a uniform spread of light pimples across her cheeks that added to her prettiness somehow.

“Another one?” she said.

He chugged a third bottle for her.

“Another one?” repeated the girl, reaching for a fourth.

He forced it down and then his head spun further away. The air-conditioning in the building had felt wonderful at first, but now he experienced its shock to his body. His throat started its prevomiting convulsions and he was barely able to swallow it still. He said, “I’m looking for Samira Jabbir.”

“I don’t know. Does she stay in this hotel?”

“I don’t think so. She’s my mother.”

“Oh. You cannot find your mother?”

“No.” Darkness swirled in on him until he was peering at her through a closing tunnel. “I come from America. Please, help
me.” His eyes spooled back into his head, and he fell hard to the marble floor.

He woke up in a back staff room. An older woman stood by the young one. She looked serious, with the composure of a boss. She wore a cardinal-red business suit and had leathery skin, bristly brown hair, eyes set unequally, and the body of a forty-year-old rock climber: wiry and shriveled from too much sun. Max lay on a round table with his legs dangling off. When he got up and sat on a chair, the serious woman told the girl to bring the plate of pita bread and hummus they’d prepared.

He finished it all, and the serious-looking woman said, “I see you are terribly allergic to hummus.” No one so much as smiled, not even her. “Jamila tells me you are looking for your mother. No one by the name Samira Jabbir is staying in this hotel.”

Max said, “No, I’m pretty sure she’s not here.”

The younger girl, Jamila, enthusiastically restated, “Yes, we do not think she is here!”

“Right. I flew here to find her. We’ve never met. She doesn’t know I’ve come.”

Max felt them becoming ill at ease. He saw how idiotic it was to be in Beirut with no real information about his mom. In over his head, he was out of ideas and out of reasons to be in these nice women’s hotel any longer.

“You are searching and have no address?” asked Jamila’s boss. “Do you remember what neighborhood at least? If we have just one more clue, we may probably help you. It’s not so hard to find people here if we have a little more data. It’s not a big city. Does she have a job or something like this? Maybe a family name that is different than Jabbir we might know?”

He wished it appropriate to ask them to leave so he could lie back down on the table for a while before picking up his bag
and getting a cab back to the airport. But then some inspiration emerged from his memory: Sunshine. Bathtub. Political science. AUB. All of which might be a lie, but he had nothing else to work with. “She may have gone to school at AUB.”