Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel Read online

  Mr. Yang called out, “Okay, excuse me, normally it may bloom in exactly one minute.” Tim could be heard from across the room, whispering loudly, “This is so freaking awesome,” to Rasheed, putting an arm around him for a rapid side-hug.

  Mr. Yang turned toward the tripoded camera and gave a speedy discourse in Mandarin, probably a brief history of the flower and of what was to come. Max saw the flower through cracks made by the suits and dresses rocking side to side like buoys. It sat in a ceramic pot on the high stool between Mr. Yang and the camcorder. It was the size of a small hand, with its hairy green fingertips touching, bursting at the seams.

  The little woman gave Max a third cube. He accepted it, sucking and chewing and swallowing back saliva while the two of them laughed together with their eyes, but these taffies weren’t getting broken down at all. Managing the enormous wad exhausted his tongue.

  Robby descended the stairs naked and waved—“Hi!”—to all the guests. Other than the little woman, most stayed faithfully glued to the flower, not allowing Robby to take priority on this big day. Max had seen Robby naked so many times, he preferred to pore over the little woman’s profile, trying to ball up the taffy in his mouth and push it into his cheek so he could get a word out. He’d thought of something to say now. Where ya from? That’s a good starter question. But she was unwrapping another taffy. Mechanically now, still staring at Robby, she handed it to Max. It didn’t occur to him to decline, and he added it to the giant mass.

  Mrs. Yang draped a quilt around Robby and walked him down so he could join everyone for the main event. She rubbed his back in big circles, saying something calming into his ear. His eyes shrunk, small as a mole’s, his mouth hinged open, agreeing serenely with whatever poetry she used on him. Rasheed asked Max with hand signs if he could see okay, and Tim wiggled his eyebrows at him. Max said yes with his head, praying they wouldn’t come over.

  The room quieted. The little woman held back a different kind of smile. Max realized she was trying to conceal what she really wanted to do: laugh at his struggle with all this taffy stuffed in his mouth. A woman in the wall of people cried, “Wasai!” and they knew it had begun. The little woman became more girl-like, standing on her tiptoes, weaving to the left and then the right, until she found a gap to see through. She turned back, inviting Max to look between shoulders with her. His mouth spread wide at her thoughtfulness, and a long cord of apricot saliva poured to the white tiled floor. She slapped her mouth shut with two cupped hands to trap in her laughter. More people oohed at whatever the flower was doing. He inhaled violently out of mortification, and the ball of taffy got vacuumed into his windpipe.

  It was too big. Not enough space around the ball to even cough, and breathing stopped for him. His chest and head got hot, and he knew some kind of explosion was under way. He couldn’t make a sound, his insides throbbed in a death-panicked frenzy, but on the outside he was frozen still. The little woman’s face pulsated: electric blue, violet, red, yellow. Something about his expression transformed hers into terror, her brow slanting into a roof. His lungs convulsed, pleading for relief. He contemplated her lovely face, humiliated, wanting to apologize. He tried to smile. If only he could keep still, until the flower went through its short life, and not ruin Mr. Yang’s moment.

  And then—snap. He dropped to the floor and thrashed, tearing at his throat. Everything clenched and released, then clenched and released again. His vision blurred so that he saw the heads crowded over him in unusually proportioned blobs, wavy, like he’d been sunk in a bathtub. His father elbowed through the guests so hard that he knocked a woman to the ground. He pulled Max up to a sitting position and whacked at his back.

  A woman shouted, “I am a doctor!” but Rasheed wouldn’t entrust his son to her.

  Rasheed yelled at Max, “Come on! Come on!” He understood that the hitting didn’t do any good so he slid behind him on the floor, propping Max’s back up against his chest. The crowd took a uniform step back and someone stumbled over the woman on the ground and went down too, hitting the bottom of the stool, tipping the flower toward Max. He watched the pot fall over the two people on the ground, as his father taught himself the Heimlich on him. He saw it vividly. Its fresh bruise-colored stem looked too frail for that heavy head. It was about a quarter of the way blossomed to its pink insides, like tender gums or an uncovered organ. It bordered on grotesque. The flower eyed him until the pot crashed against the white tiles. Soil sprayed up to his feet. It began wilting instantaneously, turning gray and then charcoal. His eyes felt as if they were bulging out of his head.

  An overwhelming calm took him, and he went limp. Nothing left to fight. Rasheed said, “Calm it down, Max, please, breathe very slowly. Please.” His tears soaked Max’s temple. Time for Max to shut down, fireworks crackled off in his brain.

  Coach Tim’s furry, red, hulking fist swung in from nowhere, punching up into Max’s ribs. The ball of taffy popped out like a glistening planet, spinning away in a slow arc. It grazed a pant leg and then met with the floor, picking up a ring of dirt as it rolled past the stool and all the way to the opposite wall. At Max’s first goose-honking breath—announcing I am here. I am alive—he kept his eye on the orange ball and couldn’t believe how much smaller it was than he’d imagined.

  TWO

  Back home, an hour after Coach Tim had saved Max’s life, Rasheed stayed glued to his son, staring with a frantic love that looked a lot like misery. He appeared drained, running off pure adrenaline, as though worry had caused his body to click over into survival mode, fighting for its life against the nightmare of losing his boy. He grabbed Max by the arm and rolled the muscles and tendons together like electrical cords, making sure his son was solid and animate. While Max poured a glass of OJ in the kitchen, Rasheed ripped him away from the counter, gripping him by the back of his neck, and plunged his nose into Max’s hair, inhaling loudly. “Dad!” Max yelled, having almost knocked over his drink. Rasheed followed him around the house like a starved zombie.

  Max escaped to his room and fell asleep in Rocket’s bed with her. A tremendous fatigue had piled in after touching his mortality. When he woke up, Rasheed sat on Max’s bed, still looking like an illness ate away at him. He presented two plates of peas and tiny burned hamburgers and a pool of ketchup. Max rubbed his eyes and breathed in the dinner, suspecting nothing had been salted or spiced. Rasheed said Coach Tim and the Yangs had stopped by. Mr. Yang brought a baby cactus for Max that looked like a green bump in a pot. He also gave Rasheed his business card to pass on to him. The card read MR. YANG: 1 (856) 567–5308.

  Rasheed handed it to Max. “For emergencies.”

  “But I know this number.” He’d had the Yangs’ home line memorized since he was five.

  “It is in case you forget during the emergency.”

  “But they still live next door, right?” He feared he’d been asleep for months.

  Rasheed clucked his tongue to end the conversation.

  He usually told Max wonderful stories, but tonight he narrated a joyless episode of a series he’d invented about a guy named Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother. The Man-Dog was a naked guy on a leash, behaving like a dog. Rasheed had originally introduced them as a man named Kip and this other man, Doug, but after Max fell into a fit of giggles at the misheard version, Rasheed decided to go forth with the Man-Dog character, and this probably allowed him to get a lot wilder with the stories than he would have otherwise. Kip and the Man-Dog started off by doing mundane things like going grocery shopping or to the movies, but then something fantastical would happen: they might get surrounded by incandescent lizard-men or find themselves on a meteor where the Man-Dog needed to dig and hollow out its center so that it gravitated to the earth as softly as a piece of popcorn. It turned into a joke for Rasheed to change the Man-Dog’s name every time, from Sam to Brandon to Dylan to Patrick and a few others. Max pretended to be outraged by this name switching and told him it didn’t match the name he’d used the time before, and Rasheed
claimed Max was the one forgetting. This evening, Kip and the Man-Dog sat in a classroom. The Man-Dog inexplicably had magical earlobes, and flung them out and cracked his teacher’s butt while she wrote something on the chalkboard. Rasheed mimed the whip of the earlobe by snapping his fingers in an uncomfortably serious way.

  After they’d finished eating, Max fake-slept. Though he never would have said so, he felt like being alone. When his father finally left, he counted backward from one hundred before sneaking out to his tree house. Once up there, he thought of that final rush of peace that blew into his body at the Yangs’, like he was death’s balloon. He stuck his head out the little window and folded his waist over the ledge, putting his weight on his abdomen. As he tipped forward, his feet got lighter and lifted off the ground. If he let himself go much farther, his back half would pick up speed and fling him upside down. He’d slip out and fall on his head. He leaned forward anyway, and it happened just as he’d anticipated. All at once. He heard himself make a helpless karate-man sound, hi ya, as his legs flipped up and tried to shoot over his back. His calves caught the inside wall above the window, toes pressing hard against the ceiling, hands squeezing the ledge, blood swelling the brain. His black hair hung straight down. A weightlessness cleaned out his chest as he imagined his skull cracking open and, for some reason, envisioned only sand spilling out. He saw a flash of his father and Coach Tim, Rocket, his bedroom, his school, the Yangs, and again, his father, ruined. Rocket traipsed out of the house and sat on the grass under him, yawning up at the top of his head. He didn’t want to die, oh God, he didn’t want to die. Of course, all it required was for him to push back on his calves and lower himself. And that’s what he did.

  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.