Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (6 page)

He also noticed she systematically put her hands on him the moment his father came back from work. Rasheed walked in, and she found and held Max, sometimes even going into his room and lying in bed with him. And he had the strong impression that only when he entered the room his father and Kelly shared did Rasheed suddenly pet her head or cuddle up to her. So Max too, in an effort to adapt to this new style of life, rushed to touch Kelly when Rasheed came in on them, commanding himself to sit close enough to her for their knees or shoulders to touch, eventually putting his arm around her. A bizarre competitiveness developed where Max simulated increasing affection for Kelly, trying to be as physical with her as his father was (or maybe even a little more), and Rasheed, in turn, seemed to grow incrementally more touchy-feely with her too.

Kelly gradually dropped her kindergarten-teacher affectations when alone with Max, addressing him in a casual way: “Hey, pass me the remote … Want a glass of OJ? … Hit those lights for me, thanks,” like a roommate, but as soon as his father showed up, she reverted to speaking to him like he was a puppy. It felt like a show to Max, but since the other two were so delighted by the dynamic, he adjusted to it. This was what having a woman in the house felt like.

She smoked exactly two cigarettes a day, talked to herself about the documentary she’d most recently watched, and cleaned.

The cleaning was more like her daily exercise, scrubbing counters and mopping as though someone was timing her. She
raced Max to be the first to disinfect the toilet or reorganize the fridge or to get to work on Rasheed’s pants and shirts. He knew he should welcome her help, but couldn’t she find some other way to contribute besides stealing his tasks? And her idea to cook as a team the night before had proven more of a nuisance than anything, slowing Max’s whole process down. He silently disagreed with the way she chopped veggies, and the order in which she pan-fried them.

He played Simon & Garfunkel while he vacuumed the living room now, and turned it down when he saw her put on her headphones, listening to what sounded like fast Latin music in her Walkman as she dusted the television. Aside from Gloria Estefan’s
Mi Tierra
, her three other cassettes were
Various West-African Rhythms
, Salt-N-Pepa’s
A Salt with a Deadly Pepa
, and
1940–1980 Songs of Revolution
.

He got hooked on her documentaries. They covered themes of poverty, sometimes war and genocide, dictatorships, and uprisings. Subject matter ranged from the Khmer Rouge killing squads to the Bay of Pigs, Franco, Baader Meinhof, Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Simon Bolivar, the Rwanda massacres, the Holocaust, racism in the United States, Frederick Douglass’s biography, the Black Panther movement, and the evils of the CIA. Max learned more about the horrors of humankind that summer than in all the history classes he’d taken.

None of Kelly’s documentaries conveyed good news. The films were narrated by the voices of men you’d think had been living underground for fifty years, smoking, drinking whiskey, and dissecting maps. Max watched cop batons come down on bloody-faced black men, still shots of gun executions and hangings, emaciated children sleeping in the mud, the ghostly newspaper-print smiles of victims or villains, prisoners crammed like chickens, orphans clawing at a roll of bread, the bloated and the diseased, lesions that looked like shreds of tongues,
piles of twisted bodies, and court cases that decided the ends of lives. Most disturbing were the people on the screen who remained calm and reasonable in interviews, with humor and a warm gaze, but had perpetrated some of history’s most inhumane acts of violence. It was this two-facedness that challenged Max’s sense of safety worst of all.

The evils flickering on the screen mixed with his proximity to Kelly’s body forced him to shed a layer of skin. His life had been so simple before Kelly and her documentaries, so undisturbed and regular. And while he missed how uncomplicated things were before the world outside of Clarence began creeping in, this darker form of learning absorbed him absolutely, and he spent more and more time with Kelly and her films.

He surprised himself when he asked her to get a documentary about the civil war in Lebanon. She was proud of him for making the request and from that point on asked for his opinion on what they watched. She started cursing around him too, and he liked that. It excited him when she verbalized her moral and political stances with intensity. Though she usually wasn’t speaking directly to him but more to herself, her views challenged him in ways that had never crossed his mind and that no other adult had ever brought up: health care is a human right and the government should treat it as such; of course gay marriage should be legal; it’s unethical for anyone to make over a few hundred thousand dollars a year when others suffer dire poverty, and there should be a nationwide salary cap enforced; if redistribution of wealth creates a just society, then inheritance should be illegal; if you really believe in fairness, then do away with national borders and establish a world democracy; guns ought to be banned, period. He and his father didn’t discuss the rights and wrongs of the world, and school had never insisted much either, let alone introduce the stimulating philosophies Kelly asserted.

The images of the Lebanese civil war documentary gave some visual context to the country and its conflicts, but the story itself remained a confused mess. There was no government or police in the Lebanon of this movie, only militarized clans, missile-striped skies, cadavers that took time to decipher as such, wailing mothers, slow zoom-ins on bullet wounds that looked like squashed cherries, and groups of children hiding behind dilapidated walls from masked men with machine guns. Max could not have imagined a greater hell.

It was around this time that he became truly afraid of death. An opening cleared inside him, and the terror that enlaces everything rushed in like bleaching light. All things seemed qualified to kill him now. All planes were capable of dropping bombs, all men of pulling out revolvers, all coughs and sneezes and meats and fruit of being the start of lethal viral epidemics, and the roof of his tree house was always on the verge of collapsing on his face, either disfiguring or ending him.

He told his father that they’d borrowed the documentary on his home country, and Rasheed demanded he stop watching such depressing things. In fact, he ordered Max to stop watching documentaries with Kelly altogether. Max acquiesced immediately, feeling he’d been saved from his own wretched curiosity. He knew he couldn’t have given it up alone.

Kelly said, “But why? These films tell the truth. What’s the harm in that?”

Max clamped up. He’d yet to hear them disagree since she moved in. They’d exchanged nothing but cuddles and smiles. Rasheed said, in a weirdly polite tone, “This disturbs everyone, honey; it’s not important to know about all the bad truth in the world.”

“Let’s ask Max what he thinks,” Kelly said. “Do you find these documentaries disturbing or educational?”

He hated the responsibility of making decisions for himself. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. They’re okay, I guess.”

“Not okay,” Rasheed said.

“Okay,” Max said.

Kelly snorted and shook her head. “Okay.”

Max tried to respect his father’s wishes, but every time she put in another documentary, he felt judged as a coward for walking away. After a day of depriving himself of the films, obsessively wondering what he was missing out on, he came back to the couch. She seemed to respect his defiance.

She asked what he thought of the Lebanese documentary, and he said it was hard to follow.

“You ever talk to your dad about this stuff?” she asked.

“I don’t think he likes talking about that.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Why do you think that is?”

He said, “When we are in America we are Americans.”

“Yeah? And being an American in America means you can’t talk about the Middle East?”

He wanted her to leave it alone. Her questioning felt like a violation of something that had been vaulted away for good reason. He trusted his father’s avoidance of this topic. Couldn’t she be satisfied that Max was already disobeying him about the documentaries? “I don’t know.”

“What about your grandparents? What do they have to say about the war?”

“I don’t have grandparents.”

She looked confused. “I mean on your mom’s side. I know your dad lost his folks, but your maternal grandparents are alive, right?”

He didn’t know how to disagree about such a black-or-white fact. Should they go back and forth,
No they’re not, Yes they are, No they’re not, Yes they are
, until one of them tired out? The suggestion that any of his relatives were still alive gave him
slight vertigo. His heart tipped forward in his chest and he stared up at the ceiling for the rest of the conversation.
No one is alive. There is only you and me now
. His father’s voice enabled him to be blunt. “They all died. Killed by a robber.”

“A
robber
?” She intently watched the credits of the documentary, as if she were carefully reading the individual Arabic names, looking for someone in particular. “So, did that happen pretty recently then?”

“Not really.” He hesitated before choosing not to tell her where they’d all been murdered and that his mother wore a cooking pot on her head. He had been trained to accept his mother’s story as a closed case and feared Kelly would question this in ways he couldn’t account for.

He stayed in the tree house a lot when Kelly didn’t have a documentary playing. He’d already spent at least fifty hours sitting up there that summer, sweating in the dark raised sauna, confronting the infinite ceiling, and letting his mind go to sauce. When the light permitted, he drew on the walls some more. For the first time in his life, he found it simpler, more gratifying, to invent than to replicate things—like Danesh’s fishbowl—that had already happened.

He filled the space around the fishbowl sketches with his imagination: a quilt of water spiders bobbing in unison to the sound of dancing helicopters overhead; gargantuan, sand-colored tongues wrestling in snow, their saliva melting everything, connecting the world with the seas, where they dominated as sea monsters, Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother floating by their side in a tree house–submarine. A couple of woolly mammoths trudging through the desert en route to that oversize golden peanut that awaited them on the horizon. A pack of smiling wolves lounging by the fire, playing marbles
and chatting with overweight ninjas who wore mittens (hands were hard to draw).

The process was cathartic, but once he stepped back, he immediately disliked what he’d made. So much so that he took on the project of erasing it all by coloring the back wall black. He exhausted a dozen markers, getting pleasantly woozy off the chemicals. In the small rectangle of light from the window, the black turned an oil-spill blue. He gazed into that oil spill, replaying the stories of Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother, or the enormous man in the tiny tree, or even the mother sitting in the bathtub. He joined all the characters up, having them plod across the oil together (Kip had uprooted the tree and carried it around with the enormous man swaying up top) as they searched for something in a vaguely urgent way.

Other times the tree house was a coffin. The dimness, mildew, and his echoed breathing created an escalating panic in him. He withstood the feeling of being buried alive for as long as possible. At the edge of hyperventilation, when his hands and feet tingled and his heart raged against his chest, he climbed down and pulled himself across the yard to go back home, rest, and learn more about the world’s atrocities.

That evening Rasheed brought home a bag of empty cans from the soda that he and coworkers at the depot had drunk all day. He decided Max would love stomping on them in the kitchen, and took photos of him grinding his teeth, his heel about to come down on the can. He clapped when Max squashed one in line with its butt.

Kelly stepped into the bathroom. When Max heard her turn on the shower, he crushed a Fanta and then casually asked, “How come we don’t know any other Lebanese people?”

“Bravo!” He clicked the camera. “Why should we?”

“I don’t know. Just seems like maybe we’d know at least one.”

Rasheed set up another can. “You know, Maxie, these Lebanese, they don’t know about being adaptable. They are stuck in the past always. They think they are part of the modern world because they wear shiny watches and perfumes, but they are a strange mixing of corrupt show-offs and very traditional and religious.” He looked away from Max. “Also, I don’t find interest in talking about who hates who in that country anymore.”

“That’s all they want to talk about?”

“No. Sometimes. Anyway, I don’t like when they talk about this. It’s not good to remember how they are crazy over there. And if I’m with Lebanese, it’s like I have to think and talk like them, like a crazy person.”

Max stood among a population of twenty-plus cans, some flattened and others bent in half, all shining their different aluminum colors. Thanks to the documentary he’d seen with Kelly, it was easy for him to imagine a country of crazy people. He remembered an old man, coated in soot and concrete dust, screaming Arabic into the camera as he dashed by. But how did those crazy people behave when not fighting? Or were they constantly fighting?

He asked, “The civil war is over, right?”

“The big one is over, sure, but there are always more wars going on, or about to go on. There is still so much hate. So much baggage and so many outside countries wanting to make a mess of everything all over again.” He set up two cans for Max and told him to stomp down on them at the same time. Before Max leaped up in the air, Rasheed leaned in closer and whispered, “This is why culture is stupid, Maxie.” He let his camera hang from his neck. “People think it unites people, but the truth is, it separates even more. We have a good life.
We don’t need culture or religion or things like this. We don’t need to swear to some kind of group or talk about past things so much. We are individuals, so why come together under a flag or something and say that because we like the same food or soccer team or politics or time of prayer that we are all the same?”