Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (27 page)

“No, I don’t regret it. Today, I get to hear you call me a brave man.” He laughed, and they had to slow down a little. “What I am saying is that a natural reaction should not be called bravery. You cannot mistake temerity for courage. Real courage requires conscious sacrifice: to realize what the stakes are and then to go forward with the action anyway. There was no thought in my decision to stand up. It was rashness. And like I said, had I thought more about it, I certainly would not have done it.” They picked up the pace. “How about now, Max, any enchanting women around us now?”

Max stared at his profile, the white eyes looking as much like injuries as the bruises and cuts. He looked up at the sky and invented this next woman for Hanuman. “Let’s see, she’s tall, has black curly hair, a mole on her cheek, red lipstick, curvy but with slender legs—”

“Not too slender, though. Right?”

“Excuse me?”

“I do not prefer stick legs. Are they thicker? Thicker is nicer.”

“Yeah, believe me, I’m with you on that. They are kind of thick.”

“What about her mouth? Tell me what you know about her mouth.”

“Soft.”

“Yes, and kind of pulpy?”

“That’s it exactly,” Max said.

“Is she alone, or with another man?”

“She’s all alone. Just by herself and looking real lonely.”

A corn-yellow smile stretched across Hanuman’s face. Then he tightened his hold on Max’s arm with concern. “You do not mean desperate, though, right?”

Max got defensive. “No. Not desperate. Of course not.”

“Good. A little bored, maybe. It is natural, no one is even talking to her.”

“Not desperate, but there is a general loneliness about her.”

“How do you know that?”

“I think it’s in her eyebrows.”

“Furrowed?”

“Yeah.”

“Plucked?”

“Nothing overdone. But there’s a slight tension there that makes it seem like she’s thinking about something deep. Like her head is somewhere else, or something, you know?”

“So, in fact, her being elsewhere is what you are calling the loneliness?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“Hm. Anyway,” Hanuman said, “she is tremendously bewitching, yes?”

A dreaminess took over. The shimmering canopy of leaves overhead and the sounds of the city lightened Max. “Yeah. She really is.”

“Does she have the nicest ass?” Hanuman wanted to know.

“Oh yeah. Really, really sweet ass.”

“Sweet? Sweet like what? Like an onion?”

“That’s interesting,” Max said. “I don’t actually think of onions as being especially sweet.”

“The onion ass, though. I know you know that is the sweet one!”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess that is pretty sweet.”

“I imagine where the small of her back meets the beginning of her oniony ass is something much like heaven.”

“Yeah, and her breath too.”

“Like your mother’s?” Hanuman suggested.

“Like my mother’s? What do you mean, ‘like my mother’s’?”

“Hm. Like what, then? Smelly like something pretty good, though, right?”

“Oh man. Something so good.”

“And her voice is pure as mountain water.”

“Pure, yeah, but not overly innocent or anything. Kinda sexy too.”

“Yes, that’s right! Like the late-night hostesses on Radio Nova.”

“Sexy and a little bored.”

Hanuman squeezed Max’s arm on emphasized syllables. “Very
sen
suous.
Slin
ky.”

“Yeah.”

“I would love to feel her trumpet on my cock.”

Max winced. “Her trumpet? I don’t think she’s really like that.”

“Of course she is. I mean, not in public. She is a lady in public. But in the bedroom she must become the complete freak.”

“She’s got pretty feet.”

“Naturally. You could lick marmalade off the feet, they are so clean and pretty. Very nice high arches too. Tender arches. She really is something. I want one like her.”

“Me too,” said Max.

The city went mad around them.

“They only cost forty euros at Barbès,” Hanuman said.

“What?”

“The whores. They cost fifty at Pigalle and only forty at Barbès. But I do not think the quality will be quite as good. We’ll see.”

“Oh.” He hadn’t thought to ask where he was taking Hanuman.

“Well, we must have almost arrived, I can hear the Métro on the bridge. You were right, that was very quick.”

“Um, yeah.” He looked around and sort of lost track of why he’d come here himself.

“Great. Listen, it has been very enjoyable speaking with you. You can leave me right under the bridge, and I will manage finding her from here.”

“She’s going to meet you here?”

“No, it’s across the street and in this alley right near here.”

“Well, what about getting across the street and finding—everything.”

“No need to worry, my friend. I will find her.”

“Alone?”

“I will ask someone to get me across the street. And then the alley is right there. She will be waiting for me.”

“You’re going to ask some stranger to get you there?”

“Yes.”

Max looked above, frowning at the bottom of the bridge, the Métro clacking over the tracks. “Yeah, yeah, I mean we’re here and everything, but—”

“Great. Well, thank you so much, Max. It has been a major pleasure.”

“Yeah. Okay then. Listen, good luck with everything.”

When they unhooked arms, it took a little wind out of Max. Hanuman brought out a folded cane from his pocket and poked
the ground with it. The stick eventually hit a bridge support, and Hanuman turned in a circle.

Max watched until Hanuman started talking to another man. Max couldn’t stand it any longer. He got between the man and Hanuman and hooked arms again.

“I’m just going to take you all the way,” he said.

“Max?”

“I was going this way anyway, and it’s so close. Let me take you there myself. I’d feel a lot better about it.”

“All right. It is only that—”

“What?”

“I do not want you to get attached.”

“Oh, come on. She’s yours—I get that.”

“No, not to her.”

“Then to who?”

No answer. Hanuman shrugged, shifting from foot to foot.

“Come on. Let’s go,” Max said. They crossed the street together. “You pretty excited to meet her?”

“Sure. I suppose. I do this most days of the week, you know?”

“You’re a lucky man, Hanuman. It must really be something.”

They rounded a corner and came upon a row of prostitutes. Max only really saw one. The one. A much older version of the exact woman they’d described earlier: mole on her cheek, curly black hair, red lipstick. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He smiled bashfully at her, crinkled his nose, and made little near-curtsies.

“Max?” Hanuman said.

“Yes. Sorry. Well, here she is,” he said, walking him up to her. “Hello.”

“Salut. C’est quarante pour une demi heure.”

“Très bien,”
Hanuman answered, unhooking his arm. “Well, thank you again, Max. Have a good one.”

“Oh, yeah, I definitely will. Hey, I never actually told you what I was even doing in Paris. It’s a pretty crazy story. I’d be happy to just wait for you until you come back down, and then I’ll tell you all about why I’m here. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“No, no, I would not feel comfortable with you waiting around for me.”

“It’s really no trouble at all, it’d be my pleasure, honestly. It’s a lovely day, and I could just sit and think. And then I’d walk you home, and we could discuss how everything went and, you know, I could tell you about how I’m looking for my mother and everything.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah!” Max said, feeling he’d piqued Hanuman’s interest.

Hanuman put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “Hey. Look at me. No, look at me. You’ll be all right.”

“I don’t like the idea of just leaving you like this.”

“I found her, right? We made it. I will be fine, you will be fine, everything is fine. Now you go on and continue enjoying this marvelous day. Go on. You can do that, I know you can.”

“How will you get back?”

“I’ve been getting around cities for a long time.”

“So, good-bye?”

“Until chance reunites us. How about that?”

Hanuman winked his beautiful discolored eye at him and walked off with the woman Max thought they had invented together.

Max trekked most all of Paris after leaving Hanuman, simultaneously coming to terms with the fact that he’d meet his mother soon and trying his best to forget about it, pretending he was just a normal guy walking around a pretty city. At about eight in the evening, when he got back to the apartment, there was a lot of commotion. It sounded like a party of people in there, but it was only Jiddo shouting at the wicker chair about how hedge funds own shares of stock that pay dividends, and Téta in the study, yelling in a tired, rasping Arabic. Presumably into the phone. Jiddo didn’t lose any momentum on his financial sermon when Max strode by him and to the door of the study.

Téta was not on the phone. She was on her knees. Her back facing Max, she rocked back and forth at another woman’s feet. Her shouting had transitioned to moaning and begging something of this woman. Max could see the crown of the
woman’s head as she bent over Téta, trying to gently pull her up. She wore a navy-blue abaya, and her maple-brown hair was in a loose ponytail. He knew who she was but didn’t.

The woman lifted her head and said, “Hakeem,” her voice smoky and low. Now Hakeem felt like it might be his real name.

He let out the breath he’d been holding, a puff of something between laughter and getting socked in the stomach,
Haah
.

“Ya Allah shu hilweh,”
she said. Her face was that of an alcoholic who spends her days in the sun, squinting, grimacing, laughing, weeping. She was striking in a worn-out, hard sort of way, with lines and scars scored across her cheeks like the palm of a hand.

“Hello,” said Max.

Téta let herself be helped up, her face red and puffy. She said something accusatory to her daughter while pointing at Max.

He and his mother stood ten feet apart. “You don’t speak Arabic,” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“You came alone?”

Max glanced over his shoulder and then back at her.

“Rasheed is coming?” she said.

“No.”

Téta attacked her with a few more Arabic words. His mother kept her eyes on him, looking defensive, suspicious of some kind of setup or trick. She said, “When did you arrive?”

His heart slammed into his ribs, trying to break free. “Yeah—I got here this morning.”

“Yes. You are happy to be here then?”

“I’m so happy.” The tears had already begun welling over.

“Good. So you are enjoying the city.”

“It’s a really nice city.”

“Very good.”

He could only look at her for so long. His eyes dashed around the walls of the room, at the portraits of a young Jiddo welcoming or being welcomed by different men from all over the world: in suits, in kaffiyehs, gandouras, and dashikis; handshakes and smiles at dinner parties, and one on a landing strip in front of a fighter jet.

He looked back at her, propelled to break the distance between them that was harder and harder to sustain. He took a step closer. Her shoulders tensed. He stopped. He could see she wanted him to stop. She wasn’t ready.

“It’s really so nice here,” he said again.

“How are you at school? Are you a good student at school?”

“I am.”

She looked at the floor. “I will not stay for long, Hakeem.”

“Oh. No. Yeah, okay.”

“You must stay for your son!” Téta said, and then came to his side and put her hand on his shoulder. It felt like a warm iron, heating his skin up to an itch. She said something biting to Samira again in Arabic, and wiped at her nose with a ball of Kleenex.

His mother said to him, “I have too many obligations there. You understand, Hakeem?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t travel like this usually. This is exceptional. Your Téta told me you were ill. I came because over the phone she said you were very ill. Now she has confessed this is not true.” Though her expression didn’t change, he could see her chest lifting and dropping underneath the abaya, her toughness failing her. “I am happy to find you are healthy.”

“Yeah, I’m healthy.”

When she spoke, it sounded like she was giving herself orders. “Now that I am here, it is my duty to tell you these things face-to-face.”

“What things?”

She answered with a question. “What is it you wanted? To see me? To talk like this? Something else?”

“What I wanted?” He hadn’t thought of it in concrete terms. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone, let alone her, would ask why he wanted to know his mother.

“I mean to say, what did you hope for when you decided to look for me? What was your intention?”

He suddenly felt ashamed of his tears. “I don’t know. Since they lied to you the way Rasheed lied to me, I thought maybe you’d want to know me.” As he said it out loud, it sunk in that he’d gotten it all wrong. She wouldn’t answer, and her gaze turned unfocused, as if daydreaming. Her stare stopped just short of him, and he felt a minuscule bottle pop inside his heart, followed by an immediate and profound need to sleep.

Still in her daze, she said, “Of course it is a great chance to be able to see you. But it will cause more suffering, you understand? I sacrificed my right to be your mother many years ago. I have no right.”

He felt his eyes grow heavy, like he really was falling asleep. “You knew I was alive. All this time.”

Her nostrils flared.

“You never once looked for me?” he asked, resting his eyes for a few seconds.

“I had you, and then I left you, Hakeem, for too long. I have no delusions about that. I could not have done it differently. I was a bad mother even before we separated. I had no right to come back into your life.”

In an oddly detached way, he said, “I would have given you the right.”

She snapped out of her daydream and took in a big breath. It sounded like a sob perched at the edge of her throat, a little bird that she managed to vacuum back down just before it flew out
of her mouth. This woke him up some. She said, “It would be wrong. Irresponsible. I chose another life.” She peeked around him and out the open door of the study. “You are sure Rasheed is not coming?”