Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (12 page)

Keying into the house, having come back from the grocery store with some quinoa, greens, and duck meat, Max heard Kelly laughing. It was a happy laugh without a trace of sarcasm. It liberated something deep inside him; a tiny well was uncovered and a soft lightness got in. An agreement had been reached. Or maybe Rasheed had at long last stood up for himself, and she respected him for it.

He stepped in and saw she wasn’t laughing with his father. Of course not. His father was at work. She laughed with Rodney, sitting at the round kitchen table pushed into the corner. She got up and wiped at her smile with the back of her hand, pinching her faded sea-green bathrobe closed with the other, so drunk she had difficulty keeping her body straight. How long had Max been gone? It couldn’t have been much more than an hour. Rodney stood up too, his cheeks shining under the fluorescent ceiling light that he was a few inches away from. Max noticed
for the first time that his features were offset, giving a boxer’s crookedness to him. As Max placed his groceries on the living room couch, avoiding getting any closer, the first person his protective instincts jumped to—before his father or himself or Kelly—was Nadine. He thought of Rodney sweating on top of her and then on top of Kelly, one after the other, and it sickened him. He despised this man’s cheating and winning body. Maybe there existed an unconscious fragment of envy.

“Hey, little man,” Rodney said, rattling Max’s chest with his baritone voice. The same bottle of vodka Max had been drinking from sat on the table next to a bag of corn chips. Rodney strutted over and palmed Max’s head, giving it a slight squeeze as if he held a water balloon he could burst with little effort, and then smirked, apparently finding something funny in the feel of Max’s head. He winked at Kelly, then picked up the bag of groceries and brought it to the table. “Anyway, Kel, we can talk about all that stuff later. I’ve got a phone meeting in a few minutes.” He walked into Rasheed’s bedroom to get his coat and shoes. He then sat at the kitchen table, slowly laced up, and left without another word.

Now it was Kelly and Max in this small gray-and-barley kitchen. “You’re home early,” she said with a guilty, flirtatious smile, her eyes blunted by the alcohol.

“Early from what?”

“I don’t know. When does school start?”

“Next week. His coat and shoes were in my dad’s bedroom?”

“Come here, Max,” she said. “Please sit down.”

He didn’t. “You’re having him over in the bedroom?” He tried to swallow down the razors climbing up his throat, unsure whether this feeling was weakness or rage.

She swayed back and forth, searching his face. Her mouth warped, the muscles slacker on one side. Her gaze vacillated between blankness and a look of amusement and then profound
despair. She steadied herself by putting a hand on the back of the chair. Her stringy hair was greasy and tangled like horseradish roots, her skin blotchy. “Hey, don’t you think it’s a little weird your name’s Max?” she slurred, and gave a silly, tired laugh. “Kind of funny for a Lebanese kid, isn’t it?

He suggested she go lie down.

“You do know that you’re Lebanese, right? You were born there and everything.”

“So what?” He regretted giving her an opportunity to expound. He held his breath, his face immediately getting hot.

Before answering, she secured a second hand on the chair to steady herself. Her face clenched, and it looked like she was about to break down, but she managed to shake it off before going blank again. Her robe split open and stopped at the tips of her nipples, the inside halves exposed. They were a tender blood-orange color. The green bathrobe, her pasty creased stomach, and her burlap-colored hedge of pubic hair made him think of a corpse. It was too much of a body, too well lit under the kitchen’s white light, so much so that he saw her in parts and layers: tissue, fat, muscle, organs, veins, tendons, bone. The way she looked at him—this half-naked drunk woman who’d helped him masturbate, who fucked the man that beat his father—caused a pulse of indignation that thundered up to his eyes. He became light as death.

“Has your father ever told you what a shitty husband he was to your mom?” She waited a while. “God. How do I put this gently? There isn’t any way to, really.”

“Then just be quiet,” he begged. “Please.”

“Be quiet?” She put a hand in the air, as if it dammed her temper, and then sighed. “Okay. No, you’re right. I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this.” She continued with the artificial sternness of a drunk: “But believe it or not, I’m actually trying to help you.”

“Why are you still here, Kelly?”

“Excuse you?”

“Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Talk about built-up bullshit in that head of yours! Ha! Let me make something perfectly clear. Your dad is not the victim, my friend. In fact, I’ll tell you what.” She leaned forward over the back of the chair and sputtered, “Don’t trust another word that comes out of his sick mouth.” She picked up her empty cup and squinted at its bottom, as though something hid down there. “You’re actually lucky I came into your life, because I’m going to give you the chance to learn about the lie you live.”

“This is so fucked,” he said.

“Oh, you have no idea how fucked it is.” Even with her two hands on the chair, her hips lilted back and forth as her head rolled around in little circles. She moaned and sat down in the chair. Vicious again, she said, “What—my sweet, warm, soft, handsome, lovable Max—would you say if I told you he’s lied about all of it? He lied about me and what I’m doing here. That’s right. Time to take responsibility for my part in this. I confess, I shouldn’t have ever come here. He lied about his money. He’s got plenty of it. Yep. Not to worry. And worst of all, he lied all about your mom.” She paused dramatically, seeming to think silence would allow her words to sink in as truth. “Oh, and my personal favorite is that he even lied about what your real name is.”

A hateful buzz whirred in his ears as he held his breath again. “You should go lie down.”

Matter-of-factly, she said, “You’re both too scared to live an honest life. Let me break it down for you.”

“I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, right, okay, I see. You don’t believe me, right?” She stood back up in an attempt to be intimidating.

He took a step closer, preparing to catch her if she fell. “You haven’t said anything.”

“Exactly wrong!” she pointed a shaky finger at him. “I’m saying everything! You’re just not listening! It’s important to listen, Maxie. Are you ready to listen?” She planted both hands on the table and slowly sat herself back down. “Jesus, you have no idea. So fucking sad.” She slapped at the table like an infant demanding food. “So fucking sad so fucking sad so fucking sad so fucking sad!” He’d seen his father smashed a hundred times, but never like this. She eventually spoke coherently again. “You’re a teenager, for Christ’s sake, and he treats you like a baby, like an actual baby that can’t understand anything. And you let him. You’re such a special kid. You’re such a good boy—but it’s time to grow up and see what kind of person he really is. You deserve the best, Max; you deserve to know about your mom and what he’s done to give you this precious fake life you have. That’s what I’m really trying to tell you about here.” She gagged a couple of times. “Don’t look at me like that, you little fucker. Is it all really so hard to believe? Are you really that goddamn blind?”

He breathed somewhat normally again, relieved that she didn’t have anything substantial to say. “It’s like three in the afternoon. You should go lie down. Sleep it off.”

Tenderly, she said, “You know what else?”

“You still haven’t said anything.” He went over and put her arm over his shoulder to get her up and take her to the bed. He was sorry for her, and that felt incredibly good.

“You don’t think it’s screwy he pretends to not be from where he’s from?” She smelled like old flip-flops. “Level with me. In all honesty, you never once thought about that as being a little off?” Letting her feet drag, she said, “Oh, and he’s not just a self-hating Arab. To your father, the only things lower than conniving terrorist Arabs are black people.” Max laid her down on her side of the bed and closed her bathrobe. “Have you seen the way
he looks at black people? How he talks about them?” Max went to get a bucket to put next to the bed. She shouted to make sure he could hear her from the bathroom. “For some reason, Asians are immune to his pecking order! Good for the fucking Yangs, right?” Her laugh was interrupted by more gagging. This time it came all the way up. She puked corn chips and vodka and bile into the bucket Max had brought just in time.

These words,
racist, lying, self-hating
, were too absurd and unspecific to worry about, like the baseless, generic insults kids used at school all the time:
fag ass, mother fucker, punk bitch
. Kelly lifted her head and with gravelly overtiredness said, “He’s a fucking racist, please tell me you at least see that part? Just as a starting point. It’s going to kill me if you don’t at least see that. Think, Max. Learn to think. I know you see it.”

New bubbles swelled his throat. “That’s all very interesting, Kelly,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me what you’re doing here with this racist then?”

She let her head fall heavily to the pillow and shut her eyes. “Your daddy’s right to treat you like a baby. You’re too young to get any of this.” He started to close the door. “But Max, when you do grow up, just ask him. You never ask him a fucking thing. You must have questions. I know you do, it’s written all over your naive face.” He closed the door and heard her say, “Ask him about your mom, Max!”

With this, she’d stomped and cracked a sealed casket deep inside of him.

While Kelly slept, Max came across Mr. Yang’s business card and decided to give him a ring. Mr. Yang asked if he’d gone out of town, and Max said, “No, I’m still next door.”

“Oh,” Mr. Yang said. Max asked how his flowers were doing. “They are very well, thank you.”

“And what about Mrs. Yang?”

“Oh, she is doing very well too.”

“How about Robby?”

“Oh, Robby is a very happy young man.”

“Good, Mr. Yang, that’s good.” Max said. “But let me ask you something,”

“Ready.”

“If a person did something bad a long time ago, but they’re generally good now, do you think that means they’re still pretty good, and so it doesn’t really matter what they did in the past?”

“Hm.” Mr. Yang didn’t answer for so long that if it hadn’t been for Robby singing in the background, Max would have thought they’d gotten disconnected. “It depend on how bad maybe,” he finally said. Max heard him snipping away at a small tree or plant.

“Well, I don’t really know how bad exactly. Let’s say it could be anything.”

“Impossible to judge anything.”

“Okay, let’s say this person killed like twenty people, but like twenty years ago or something. And ever since then he’s been good, and really wishes he hadn’t killed all those people. And wants to just forget about it all.”

“Twenty people a lot of people. A lot of people with a lot of family.”

“I guess even killing one person is kind of a lot, in a way. Okay, what about if someone is hiding secrets from his own family?”

“That depend. Why is he hiding them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it to protect them or to protect himself?”

“Them.”

“That might be all right.”

“And if it’s to protect himself?”

“This is less honorable.”

“Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Mr. Yang, I’ve got to go feed Rocket now.”

“Max?”

“Yes?”

“I think all that matter is that he a good man now.”

“Who is?” Max asked, suspicious of Mr. Yang knowing something he didn’t. “Who’s a good man now?”

“Does not matter. Anyone.”

“Huh. Okay. What about wife-beaters?”

“Sorry?”

“A man who hits his wife. Or is like really mean to her. That’s seriously bad.”

“Yes, it is a terrible thing. Max, is something wrong at home?”

He briefly inspected the kitchen, checking that the table was in its usual place in the corner, the fridge looked stable enough, the window intact, nothing overtly broken. “No, why?”

“Come over to visit soon.”

“I will.”

After hanging up, he went to lie down on the floor next to his bed. Rocket waddled over and clambered on top of him, clumsily setting her front paws on his thighs and her hind paws on his chest. Once she’d found her footing, he patted her side as she panted proudly at the closed bedroom door, like an explorer on a raft, nearing the mainland. Her tail brushed back and forth across his face.

He needed to tell his father Rodney had been in the house. He knew that. But when he saw Rasheed in the kitchen that night, his cheeks still discolored from Rodney’s hand, Max was
incapable of giving him bad news. Instead he walked out the back door and climbed up into his masochistic space.

Ten minutes later, Rasheed came up into the tree house and lay down next to him. It was the first time they’d been up there together at night. A little moonlight glowed through the tiny window. Just as Max had decided to tell his father about Rodney—here and now, under cover of this dark box, no excuses—he heard himself ask about his mother: “Did you and my mom get along?”

“Sure. Like two of the best peas.”

“So you were nice to each other? Even up until the end?”

“That’s right. We were always very nice to each other.”

“Until the robber came?” Max felt younger than his age. He spoke with a babyish register, wanting to be coddled with reassurances.

“Yes.”

“Why did the robber kill everyone? Why would he do that? Why didn’t he just rob them and leave?”

“I already told you about this,” Rasheed said.

“Kelly says I should ask you again.”

“She did? What else did she say?” He sounded livid.

“Just that.”

“What else did she say, Max?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Rasheed took a lot of deep breaths. “You know, Max, you have been thirteen years old for some days.”