Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (8 page)

“Thank you. Yes.” Conscious of his erection again, he felt her presence become intolerable. Even her body heat felt invasive and dirty to him now. He lay unmoving, as if he hid between a whale’s jaws; the smallest movement would cause her to snap down on him. He suppressed an urge to scream. She perceived his discomfort enough to release him, but didn’t leave.

“I don’t think I can sleep,” he said, meaning,
Because you’re here
.

“Just try, honey. Just close your eyes. I know it’s hard.” She brought her arm over to hug him again and accidentally grazed his penis through the blanket. She pulled away as if burned by it.

“Sorry!” he said.

“No, no, that’s okay, honey. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. That’s really normal. It’s fine.” The honor in her voice repulsed him.
It was like this when I woke up! It has nothing to do with you!
he wanted to yell. He just wished she’d leave. Instead, she said, “You know, when I was your age, my mother made me feel ashamed of that kind of stuff. She told me those urges were evil. And that was wrong. She made me feel so—unclean and alone.” She brought her face closer to his. Her breath was sharp and everywhere. “There’s nothing shameful about your urges, Max. You’re allowed to feel that way, and you’re allowed to relieve yourself too. You know that, right?”

He couldn’t possibly respond. Why was she talking like she was being helpful?

“Wait. Do you know how to relieve yourself?” She said. “Have you let yourself do it before?”

This he couldn’t answer intelligently either. Of course he knew how to relieve himself. But out loud he resorted to the quick shirking response he always gave when supremely uncomfortable. “I don’t know.”

She lay in silence for a while before eventually sighing. “Okay. That’s okay. What you can do is rub it against the bed, up and down. You’ll sleep like a baby right after, I promise. It’s all right. I’m going to walk you through this. I’m not going to leave you, honey. Don’t worry. Now turn over onto your stomach.” Indignantly, he did. He turned away from her, facing the wall. “Good. Now go ahead,” she said, “move up and down so it rubs against the bed.” Unsure as to why, when she told him what to do, rooting him on in eerily soothing tones, he obeyed. He rubbed slowly at first, then with a certain determination. Kelly patted his back, like she was burping an infant. Rocket exhaled loudly, and Max felt pathetic but couldn’t stop. He rubbed harder and harder, and gradually brought himself closer to her, turning to face her with his eyes sealed shut. Her hair touched his face. She didn’t move away; she lay still, repeating, “It’s all right, you’re doing fine, you’re almost there,” until he found himself actually rubbing it against her thigh. Their skin never made direct contact, and she showed no sign of there being anything remotely sexual about it on her end. This made it so much worse, as though she were making a brave sacrifice for him. When he came, she said, “Goooood,” like when a dog fetches a stick.

She swept his bangs off his sweaty brow and kissed the tip of his nose. He heard her lips part into a smile. “There. Now you know how to do it. Anytime you have those urges, you can just
do that by yourself and feel good about it, okay? No shame.” Before leaving, she imposed a final meaningful pause that seemed to say,
We’ve just shared something so special
.

Danny Danesh once drew a naked woman on his stomach, her legs spreading open from his bellybutton. Fascinated by this image, Max went home and did the same to himself, staring at the disproportionately large vagina in the bathroom mirror. He put his pinkie inside it like Danny had done for his friends. The physical discomfort of touching the knot of scar tissue back there was something Max kept going back for well after he’d scrubbed the woman away. Whenever he needed to be uncomfortably invigorated, he jammed his pinkie into his navel. It had the same allure for him as licking a nine-volt battery over and over, or continuing to sniff the air when something foul lingered in it.

He was lying in his tree house now, cramming both pinkies into his belly button, when he heard his father’s voice. “What are you doing in here?”

Max, who’d been grunting from the discomfort he caused himself, sat up. “Nothing.” It took a while to make out the outline of his father’s head, poking up into the tree house.

Rasheed said, “We are going to play board games with Kelly. I bought the Game of Life today. Come inside.”

“All right. Dad?” he asked his father’s shadow of a head. “Did my mom teach a peasant how to read in her father’s living room?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Kelly told me.”

Max stared at him long enough for Rasheed to feel the need to say something more. In a single breath he said, “She got into fights with her father when he came home and saw bunches of peasants sitting around the coffee table. That’s all.”

“Bunches of peasants? I thought it was just one peasant.”

He sighed. “Listen, there may have been one or there may have been bunches. I don’t remember. The point is she wanted to help the world, like Kelly. She was incredibly tough cookies, just like Kelly. So tough that she didn’t tolerate people very well who asked too many questions about her or who didn’t care about the Game of Life.” He slapped the tree house floor twice to get Max moving. “Okay, come down now.”

Max avoided Kelly’s eyes as they played the board game that didn’t resemble anyone’s life he knew of. Rasheed and Kelly drank and laughed a lot as they played. They looked happy. Max felt sad but did an excellent job of hiding it. He went to bed before they finished, claiming he was just sleepy.

The next morning, Sunday, his father’s day off, Max shuffled into the kitchen and poured himself a bowl of Bran Flakes at the round table. He disliked the gaps that the round table made up against the corner. There existed a profound unfairness in those two being forced together.

Instead of eating, he squirted yellow dish soap into the bowl and watched the dense globules refuse to mix with the water and cereal. He wanted an egg to crack into the bowl now. What would happen? Would the yolk join the soap? Rupture and smoke around the bran flakes? Float at the top, like a sun? Would everything blend together into a brownish wet cement guck, a thick substance he could sculpt with, or throw at someone’s stupid unwelcome face?

He opened the fridge in search of the egg but got sidetracked by a brilliant red apple sitting on the bottom shelf. A puddle of milk gleamed a few centimeters from the apple, yellowed and motionless. The apple was lighter than it should have been. Probably meant a cushion of air separated the skin and flesh. He took an angry bite, and smacked up and down on the floury consistency and that web of cold skin. He spat the patch
of apple into his palm and squeezed it into a kidney-shaped lump, then pressed it back into the apple where he’d taken the bite. Placing it in the milk puddle, he rotated the bitten and replastered part away from him so that it faced the back of the fridge.

Kelly came out wearing a brown T-shirt and dirty-white terrycloth shorts. “Ready for a big breakfast?” she said. “I’ll need some ingredients from the store.” Her thighs were diagramed with veins and olive-green bruises.

Max wondered what she was playing at here. He stammered, “I just, it usually just takes me a second to plan out what I’m going to cook and everything, so—”

“I know. But I’m going to take care of it this morning.”

He should have expected this day to come. On previous Sundays she had managed to simultaneously compliment the meal Max had prepared while slipping in stories of her own breakfast achievements from her past life. Now, finally, she would be the head chef.

“Max,” Rasheed called from his bedroom, “go to the store and get her the ingredients for breakfast, please.”

“Okay,” he said.

She handed him a list and twenty dollars. “Hey,” she said, “I’m not trying to take over or anything, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t make a mean frittata.” She blew him a kiss before going back into the room with his father and shutting the door.

Outside, he saw Rodney raking leaves into a trash bag. The rake looked brittle in his hands. He boomed at Max, “Hey there!”

It took Max off guard. They’d never exchanged a word before. “Hello.”

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

His eyes beaded about. “It’s summer.”
And on top of that it’s Sunday
, he wanted to say.

Rodney squinted a little harder than the sun had previously made him. “I’m Rodney.”

“Hi, I’m Max.”

“Good to meet you,
Jack
.” The way he said it, Max wasn’t sure if Rodney had misheard him or if Jack was some kind of nickname. “Too bad it’s only now you say hello. After how many months of living across the street from me?”

You’ve never said hello either, Max thought.

Rodney winked. “I’m just messing with you, man. Hey, make sure that bike seat isn’t too high. Don’t want to injure the goods, know what I mean?”

Max looked down at where his goods met the seat and mumbled, “You got it.” He started riding off but stopped when Rodney continued talking.

“I met your mommy the other day.”

“My mo— Oh, that’s not my mom.”

Rodney said, “That’s not very nice. You think she’d appreciate you saying that?”

Max inspected his front tire awhile, unsure of why the truth wasn’t nice. He had a quick fantasy of dropping the bike, diving across the lawn, and spearing Rodney in the chest with the top of his head. Of course, Max would bounce right off him.

Rodney gave another wink. “Well, all right, Jack-O. A pleasure meeting you anyway. Remember what I told you about the goods.”

Max gave a downward nod, and Rodney returned it with an upward nod. Max favored the downward nod because it resembled a bow of respect. The upward nod was aggressive. It seemed to be saying
What?
with the chin,
Yeah, what?

Kelly’s breakfast was quick and uneventful. Her frittata didn’t taste right. The next day he was home alone and felt a
queer stillness in the house. The creaks took odd priority; the clicking of Rocket’s nails on the kitchen floor sounded loud as a slow typewriter. He followed her to the front door, where she stood staring at it. She sat down, looked back at Max, and then again at the door. He peeked through the living room window and saw Coach Tim standing out there. Max waited another minute, but Tim didn’t ring or knock. Eventually Max opened up anyway.

“Oh, whoa— Hey, Maxie.” He was wearing mirror sunglasses. Max could see two funhouse reflections of himself and Rocket in Coach’s eyes.

“Hi, Coach. What’s up? My dad’s at work, but—”

“Yeah, I know.” He looked terrible, fatter. His apple cheeks and massive bull-like shoulders had always given him a hunched aspect, but now he was especially stooped. “I came to check up on you, actually. How have you been?”

“Really good.”

“I hear you all have a new roommate.”

Kelly had left early that morning, maybe to the library. Something had happened between her and Rasheed the night before. There was a lot of angry whispering. At one point he heard Rasheed hissing, “I don’t care! Don’t ever talk about those things with him, do you understand? Keep what I say to yourself.” It ended in Kelly storming out of the house at four in the morning, saying, “I didn’t sign up for this shit, Reed.” Max went to the living room and saw her walking laps around the block, talking to herself. She came back in at around five. She didn’t so much as look at Max, ate a bowl of cereal, and then headed out again. He worried that it had something to do with how he had rubbed up on her, but his father’s gentleness toward him that morning reassured him that their fight was about something else.

“Oh, yeah. Kelly,” Max said.

“How’s that going?”

“It’s really good.” Things weren’t really good with Kelly, Max knew that, but he was complicit in the ways they were least good. He couldn’t complain because it might lead to her telling Rasheed what would cause irreparable harm. Max also wanted Tim to believe they were doing well without him, that Max and Rasheed were enough and that no new person in their home could threaten the indissoluble pair. Men and women could come and go in Rasheed and Max’s life and the two of them would be left standing close and tall, no matter what these unpredictable people did or didn’t do.

“Yeah?” He took off the sunglasses. Puffy half-moons cradled his eyes.

“Yeah.”

“Your dad seem all happy and everything?” He laughed.

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” Coach stared at Max’s feet. He tottered back and forth and then took off his cap to scratch his scalp with his crab-colored pinkie. With the hat off he looked like a big baby. “And what about you? You really like having her around? I mean, like, things are better?”

He felt his face getting red now. “I mean, it’s been pretty good.”

“Good. That’s great.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Great.”

“Great.”

“Yeah.”

Tim had disappeared from their lives. They used to see each other nearly every day, and though Max usually got pushed aside when Tim came over, he suddenly missed him, more than he’d previously known. Max looked at Tim’s expansive chest and then up at his clean-shaven chin and then down at one of his furry red fists before saying, “So, I’ll tell my dad you came over.”

“No, no, don’t. Do me a favor, and please don’t.”

“Okay.”

“
Psh
, yeah right, like all I need now is for him to think I came over. Anyway. I wanted to make sure you were all right.” His voice cracked a bit. “So, you playing any ball this summer?”

“Nah. Haven’t been playing much.”

“Well, you should keep that J in good form for next season. We’ll need you to drain those midrange jump shots.”

“All right.” It embarrassed Max to talk about basketball with Coach Tim. Max had no J. He drained no midrange jump shots. Coach gave him way too much playing time during games, which was not fine by Max and not fine by Danny Danesh, who couldn’t trust Max to catch the ball when he passed it to him from behind his mothafuckin’ back. Max was the third worst player on the team, but the absolute worst when under the pressure of a real game and the paralyzing resentment of his teammates for being the starting small forward. At the huddle before games, when Tim announced the lineup, Max fantasized about saying,
No, Coach, you know goddamn well I’m not the man for the job. Put Ben in. Ben’s been working so hard in practice. He’s earned it.
And then Ben, Danny Danesh, and the rest would take a moment to admire Max for putting the team first. But Max didn’t do that. Max did only what he was told.