Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (3 page)

He lay on the wooden floor, his heart still thumping, and took in the dark ceiling. He meditated on what would be worse, dying in outer space or in the middle of the ocean at night. The
only dead person Max knew of, and who he was in any way connected to, was his mother. Rasheed had made it clear that there wasn’t much he wanted to say about her, and so her ghost had been formed by abstract descriptions here and there—no photographs or letters or jewelry, just the vague sketch of a woman who seemed excruciating for Rasheed to so much as allude to. Max only knew that she had been beautiful, smart, strong, and murdered by a man trying to rob their home in that place called Beirut, Lebanon. He wondered little about her in a direct sense because he’d never had anything concrete to miss, no person to imagine or idea to hold on to.

His father climbed up a few minutes later, out of breath. “Where have you been?”

“Here.”

“I’ve been looking.” His voice sounded different in the tree house, hollowed. He lay next to Max and went quiet. Feeling the timing either perfect or awful, Max carefully broke open the silence by asking about his mother’s death. That’s a story he was curious about now, if only because she was a real person who had been killed by real life. Rasheed mumbled that she’d died long ago. Max knew as much, but hadn’t ever gotten any specifics. Lying in the obscurity like this made it feel safe to ask. Max could barely see his father. Rasheed’s features were fuzzed by the dim light coming through the window. He had a hazed shark’s fin for a nose, his eyes glimmered like wet paint, and his mouth: a dry crack that parted. Rasheed shut his eyes, not answering for so long that Max started to think he’d fallen asleep.

Rasheed finally said, “You were just a baby. I was walking up the stairs of our building with you in my arms, and when we arrived to the apartment the robber had already come and killed everyone. That’s it. Finished.” He got up to leave. The subject had chased him out.

“Everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Like who’s everyone?”

His voice trembled. “Everyone is everyone. All of the family: parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, friends, cousins, everyone. There is only you and me now. Okay?”

“No survivors?”

Rasheed started climbing down. “No one is alive.”

“What did the robber want?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did he take? Jewels?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t care about checking for jewels.”

“No one tried to fight back against the robber?”

He stopped halfway down the ladder. “Maybe they tried.” He spoke like he’d just forced himself to swallow some acrid medicine. “I was not there to see. Or help.”

Max wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but that wasn’t how he and his father operated. Max didn’t say whether Rasheed did right or wrong. He expressed no judgments, gave no recommendations, offered no consolations.

A teardrop hammocked the bottom of his father’s eye. “Your mother cared about protecting you too much. She wore a cooking pot.”

“She what?”

“She took you into the bathroom and sat in the bathtub with you, wearing a cooking pot on her head.” He gave a single sad chuckle. “Really, a cooking pot on her head all day, and you in her arms. She was a sunshine, you know. She would not leave that tub.”

“Why?”

“Oh. Because of war. Bombings and rockets and so on.”

“I didn’t have a cooking pot for the war?”

“No. You were a baby. You had a baby’s head.” He got stern and closed up again. His tone indicated there would be no more
particulars. The cooking pot was all Max would get. And for now it felt like enough. Thanks to the darkness of the tree house, his father had said much more than he’d intended.

This brief exchange filled Max with a prideful sadness, a sort of nostalgia for family he didn’t know. It added a profundity to his life that he was related to so many killed people.

He woke up the next morning thinking about the time Danny Danesh drew a giant fishbowl on the bathroom stall door. Inside the fishbowl Danesh had sketched the details of an arctic ice-fishing village: igloos, fur-hooded fishermen with spears, their children, and the chill-panting huskies that pulled their sleds. Behind the fishbowl stood a naked man, the size of the stall door, holding the bowl at the level of his genitals. His penis poked through a hole and lay in the middle of the ice-fishing village. The fishermen in the picture didn’t seem to take notice of the penis. They continued gutting fish, feeding their dogs, tightening up the bags on their sleds, laughing by the fire, and so on, as though it were merely a natural element in their arctic world. Danny had boldly signed the drawing
Double D! Bitches!

Max brought his set of fat Prismadeluxe art markers up to the tree house, planning to depict the same fishbowl scene on the back wall. During a short part of the morning a small square of light projected itself on that wall, and it would make a perfect canvas for Max to draw on. He started drawing the fishermen, but their heads kept coming out either overly circular or oblong. The fish were stick-figure-eights with eyes, the igloos looked like baseball caps, and the fishbowls turned out lopsided every time. As the frame of sunshine slid across the wall with the slow marching of day, he left a trail of more bowls, a series of lumpy penises and dog sleds that resembled a poorly rendered rock formation, and finally, a stall-door-size man with the form of a city mailbox.

Rasheed had bought Max the high-quality art markers long ago after seeing him doodle a pony on a shopping bag. In his father’s mind, Max was a virtuoso at anything he thought about doing. The boy just needed the right tools or gear, and innate talent would take care of the rest. When Max started playing basketball for Coach Tim the year before, Rasheed had bought him two pairs of the most expensive basketball shoe, describing them as the “fastest sneakers on the market,” presuming that now Max had all he needed to become the star player. Rasheed once got him a Stowa Airman wristwatch for looking up at a plane in the sky. He told Max all the great pilots had such watches. And when Max watched the Tour de France, Rasheed bought him fingerless lambskin biker gloves. Max liked to sit with Rocket on the front porch and drink Virgin Marys with the gloves on. Rasheed never showed a glimmer of disappointment when Max didn’t become the star player, express further interest in aviation, or ride his bicycle more than before. No, Rasheed had no expectations of his son, treating him as if he’d already achieved greatness by virtue of being himself. Mostly Max appreciated Rasheed’s blind faith, but occasionally it made him feel his father just didn’t know him all that well.

Once the light was gone, he regretted using the permanent markers. He knew that when he saw the drawings tomorrow they would be even more disappointing, uglier.

Besides Max, Marion Street was childless, save for when the neighbors looked after a niece or nephew or grandchild. He spent his time during the summer almost exclusively with Rocket, waiting for his father to come home. Rasheed had a few free hours on any given day, aside from Sunday, when not at either of his two jobs (the warehouse or the night shift at the gas station). Most evenings, they ate a new dish Max had
learned from the television, and took Rocket on exceptionally short walks (to and from the Yangs’, for example). She did not love walks, and when she’d had enough, she plopped to her belly. Her head, small for her neck, like that of a seal, slipped out of her collar when she stopped moving forward. They had to pick her up and carry her home in these instances. She had her own small doggie door to get in and out of the backyard as she pleased, so timing bathroom breaks wasn’t imperative anyway.

The day after the incident at the Yangs’, Max pretended not to notice his father staring at him while he watched
Seinfeld
reruns after lunch. Rasheed looked tired. He had an hour before he needed to head back to work. The purses under his eyes were a darker plum and fuller than usual.

“Max,” he said, “please switch off the television a moment. Thank you. Do you remember the story I told you of the man who climbs up into a tree and never comes back down from that tree?”

“Yeah.”

“He is an enormous man on a very small tree. He is a very lonely man and takes his shirt off up there.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“The tree looks like it will break because he is too big. It cannot maintain him forever, but the man stays on top of that small tree, for years, years, and years. It rains on him, and he cries.”

“Yep.”

“All right, well, do you know why this man was inedibley so sad?”

He meant inevitably. “Why?” Max asked. Though he did know, he’d been told a number of times. The man was so sad because he’d lost his friends and family in a village raid orchestrated by an evil witch and her band of possessed elves. He had
nothing left to live for and so climbed the tiny tree and waited for death to come. The witch left him with the ultimate sentence of never being allowed to die. Max was too afraid to ask why living forever was considered punishment.

But now the cause of the enormous man’s sadness had changed: “He was so sad,” Rasheed explained, “because he could not love a woman. He could not open his heart enough to love a woman.”

“Really?”

“Max, I have invited a woman.”

“Here?”

“We will have dinner with her before I go to my other work. I think you want this, no?”

“Want what?”

“A woman in the house.”

“Yeah, no, a lot. When?”

“Tonight.”

Jesus. What would Max make? He’d need to vacuum, iron his father’s indigo shirt, no, his yellow one, his nicest. They must both wear ties. The counters should be rewiped. What did their home smell like? Did it smell weird in here? This might be an occasion for those citronella candles he’d bought.

Max sensed even what he couldn’t make sense of. He knew this sudden need for a woman was related to Rasheed’s telling of his family’s death, and more specifically of his wife’s death. Their conversation, the longest they’d ever had on the topic, had relieved some of the weight Rasheed lived under, and now he was ready to move forward.

The woman with the pot on her head still hadn’t inspired much curiosity in Max about her as an individual. His relationship to her was like the one he had with Kip and his Man-Dog
of a brother, or the Man in the Tree. Though often moved by these characters, he didn’t feel he’d missed out on knowing them personally. This woman with the pot on her head had crossed his mind a couple of times since yesterday, sure, but the story’s greatest effect was on Max’s interpretation of his father’s sadness. That lost expression Max saw when Rasheed came home sloppy drunk from Coach Tim’s, as though he’d entered the wrong house, wishing he was still at his friend’s, and the desperate whimpering sounds he made in his sleep that sounded like a boy calling up from a well, they were all symptoms of Rasheed’s guilt about Lebanon, about being out of the room while all the most important people in his life were massacred. This visceral understanding of his father’s motives poured down on Max like a religious revelation.

His father groomed himself somewhat obsessively before the date, principally the mustache. Max offered to tidy up his ear and neck hair, one of the little jobs that made him feel necessary. He loved cooking and shopping and cleaning for the same reason: to feel like he was actually good at something—qualified. Though Rasheed said a boy Max’s age shouldn’t behave like a domestic wife, he looked pleased to come home to dinner, a Pine-Sol’d kitchen floor, and folded laundry, kissing Max without stating what he was thanking him for. As long as Rasheed didn’t see Max doing the work, he appreciated the outcome.

While Max prepped the beef, oxtail, and veal for the pot au feu, he tried to anticipate what their guest would be like, thinking about women he’d just seen at the grocery store: a gray-haired lady in spandex who inspected her produce with a frowny face of deep concentration; another woman who spoke loudly into her cellular phone as she clomped up and down the aisles, starting her sentences with drawn-out
maybe
s,
perhaps
es,
and
I feel like
s, wrapping up her thoughts with a philosophy of fatalism where everything is precisely as it should be, and happens for a reason.

He put all the meat into a pot of cold water—followed by the leeks, celery roots, and carrots he’d peeled and cubed—before turning the heat on. Then there was the checkout lady who had dry yellow hair that sat like a triangle of foam on her head, and the kind of heavy glasses that seemed responsible for her nasal voice as she commented on the items she scanned with superlative enthusiasm: “These are just the best ever … Isn’t this the most amazing … Oh my God, these are my favorite in the entire universe.” She leaned in close to thank Max before handing him his receipt. Her breath smelled of a mixture of white wine, rot, and babies’ heads.

He pushed two cloves into each onion half and added them to the water when it started to boil. As he cut the potatoes and cored a head of cabbage, his mind made a collage of the tabloids that documented famous women’s stretch marks, inner arms and thighs, creases, pigmentation scoured by whitening creams, sun-mottled skin, makeup, pregnancy, warped and bunioned feet.

He brought the pot to a slow simmer. Older women were richer, layered, bordering on mythical. They had a substance Max had studied from a distance: schoolteachers, Mrs. Yang, weatherwomen and newscasters, the female chefs on the Food Network who taught him new dishes and gave him the idea to make vodka cranberry drinks (careful not to overdo it with his father’s stash), and some neighbors he’d seen around, chiefly Nadine, the attractive black woman who had recently moved into the yellow house across the street. He liked to watch her work in her yard from the living room window.

Putting the cornichons, sea salt, and hot mustard into separate ramekins and setting them on the kitchen table, he thought of women he’d seen moving about with a pleased expression,
and others with a silent pain. Some exuded sexuality, some self-preservation, wisdom, courage, and others creativity and brilliance.