Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel Read online

  “Max,” he said, “please switch off the television a moment. Thank you. Do you remember the story I told you of the man who climbs up into a tree and never comes back down from that tree?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He is an enormous man on a very small tree. He is a very lonely man and takes his shirt off up there.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “The tree looks like it will break because he is too big. It cannot maintain him forever, but the man stays on top of that small tree, for years, years, and years. It rains on him, and he cries.”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, well, do you know why this man was inedibley so sad?”

  He meant inevitably. “Why?” Max asked. Though he did know, he’d been told a number of times. The man was so sad because he’d lost his friends and family in a village raid orchestrated by an evil witch and her band of possessed elves. He had nothing left to live for and so climbed the tiny tree and waited for death to come. The witch left him with the ultimate sentence of never being allowed to die. Max was too afraid to ask why living forever was considered punishment.

  But now the cause of the enormous man’s sadness had changed: “He was so sad,” Rasheed explained, “because he could not love a woman. He could not open his heart enough to love a woman.”

  “Really?”

  “Max, I have invited a woman.”

  “Here?”

  “We will have dinner with her before I go to my other work. I think you want this, no?”

  “Want what?”

  “A woman in the house.”

  “Yeah, no, a lot. When?”

  “Tonight.”

  Jesus. What would Max make? He’d need to vacuum, iron his father’s indigo shirt, no, his yellow one, his nicest. They must both wear ties. The counters should be rewiped. What did their home smell like? Did it smell weird in here? This might be an occasion for those citronella candles he’d bought.

  Max sensed even what he couldn’t make sense of. He knew this sudden need for a woman was related to Rasheed’s telling of his family’s death, and more specifically of his wife’s death. Their conversation, the longest they’d ever had on the topic, had relieved some of the weight Rasheed lived under, and now he was ready to move forward.

  The woman with the pot on her head still hadn’t inspired much curiosity in Max about her as an individual. His relationship to her was like the one he had with Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother, or the Man in the Tree. Though often moved by these characters, he didn’t feel he’d missed out on knowing them personally. This woman with the pot on her head had crossed his mind a couple of times since yesterday, sure, but the story’s greatest effect was on Max’s interpretation of his father’s sadness. That lost expression Max saw when Rasheed came home sloppy drunk from Coach Tim’s, as though he’d entered the wrong house, wishing he was still at his friend’s, and the desperate whimpering sounds he made in his sleep that sounded like a boy calling up from a well, they were all symptoms of Rasheed’s guilt about Lebanon, about being out of the room while all the most important people in his life were massacred. This visceral understanding of his father’s motives poured down on Max like a religious revelation.

  His father groomed himself somewhat obsessively before the date, principally the mustache. Max offered to tidy up his ear and neck hair, one of the little jobs that made him feel necessary. He loved cooking and shopping and cleaning for the same reason: to feel like he was actually good at something—qualified. Though Rasheed said a boy Max’s age shouldn’t behave like a domestic wife, he looked pleased to come home to dinner, a Pine-Sol’d kitchen floor, and folded laundry, kissing Max without stating what he was thanking him for. As long as Rasheed didn’t see Max doing the work, he appreciated the outcome.

  While Max prepped the beef, oxtail, and veal for the pot au feu, he tried to anticipate what their guest would be like, thinking about women he’d just seen at the grocery store: a gray-haired lady in spandex who inspected her produce with a frowny face of deep concentration; another woman who spoke loudly into her cellular phone as she clomped up and down the aisles, starting her sentences with drawn-out maybes, perhapses, and I feel likes, wrapping up her thoughts with a philosophy of fatalism where everything is precisely as it should be, and happens for a reason.

  He put all the meat into a pot of cold water—followed by the leeks, celery roots, and carrots he’d peeled and cubed—before turning the heat on. Then there was the checkout lady who had dry yellow hair that sat like a triangle of foam on her head, and the kind of heavy glasses that seemed responsible for her nasal voice as she commented on the items she scanned with superlative enthusiasm: “These are just the best ever … Isn’t this the most amazing … Oh my God, these are my favorite in the entire universe.” She leaned in close to thank Max before handing him his receipt. Her breath smelled of a mixture of white wine, rot, and babies’ heads.

  He pushed two cloves into each onion half and added them to the water when it started to boil. As he cut the potatoes and cored a head of cabbage, his mind made a collage of the tabloids that documented famous women’s stretch marks, inner arms and thighs, creases, pigmentation scoured by whitening creams, sun-mottled skin, makeup, pregnancy, warped and bunioned feet.

  He brought the pot to a slow simmer. Older women were richer, layered, bordering on mythical. They had a substance Max had studied from a distance: schoolteachers, Mrs. Yang, weatherwomen and newscasters, the female chefs on the Food Network who taught him new dishes and gave him the idea to make vodka cranberry drinks (careful not to overdo it with his father’s stash), and some neighbors he’d seen around, chiefly Nadine, the attractive black woman who had recently moved into the yellow house across the street. He liked to watch her work in her yard from the living room window.

  Putting the cornichons, sea salt, and hot mustard into separate ramekins and setting them on the kitchen table, he thought of women he’d seen moving about with a pleased expression, and others with a silent pain. Some exuded sexuality, some self-preservation, wisdom, courage, and others creativity and brilliance.

  He slid the potatoes and cabbage into the pot of water. What were women really? He knew there was much more to them than what he’d seen. How did they stand and sit and talk at home, when away from the roles work and social expectations imposed? What did the ones whose voices he’d never heard sound like? What about when they spoke to the person they loved most? What did their faces and armpits smell like? Why did the breathtaking ones become even more stunning when distressed, when they squinted, bit their lips, brought their hands to their mouths? He wanted to know everything about them. The little he did know suggested something epic, of great importance. He intuited that they had the capacity to show him a more authentic version of himself, able to see all sides of him with a simple glance.

  He removed the beef and cut it into pieces, then used a marrow spoon to dig out the inside of the veal bone.

  Her name was Kelly, a secretary at the warehouse where Rasheed worked. She had a long mess of champagne-colored hair that sat bunned on top of her head, stringy and frayed. Twenty-two years old, thin-lipped, with a narrow jaw and a little waxen nose spangled with freckles, she had the physique of a prairie dog: skinny in the shoulders, belled out at the waist, small pyramids for breasts. She wore a dress the color of an old pinecone. There was a kind of weak prettiness to her. She reminded Max of a sticky-skinned girl in his class named Laura who had a bloated peach for a head.

  Kelly had prevented his father from getting fired by negotiating additional unpaid days of absence for him. Rasheed had called in sick thirteen times in the past six months, and the boss wanted to let him go, but Kelly organized a petition to save his place. They didn’t really know each other, and Kelly’s argument was more political than personal. It had to do with how the company ought to maintain a certain number of minority workers. Though Rasheed had never asked her for such backing, and probably wasn’t crazy about the premise by which she
defended him, he was grateful to have kept his job. He’d missed so many days of work because he sometimes dropped into a crippling melancholy that he called the flu. These flus could keep him bedridden for a week at a time.

  When Kelly arrived, Rasheed presented her to Max in a sober, businesslike manner. Then they stood in the kitchen, staring at her, as if she had something grand to reveal, as if they’d been waiting years for Kelly to stroll into their gray-and-barley kitchen and give them the answer to a question they should have been pondering their whole lives. But they didn’t know the question yet, and she didn’t seem to know what to say exactly.

  Before it had been made evident that a woman was all that lacked in their lives, it never occurred to Max that his father thought about women at all. Rasheed didn’t show signs of desire, didn’t laugh at suggestive jokes on sitcoms, and behaved apologetically in the presence of women. He held doors for them and said sorry as they passed through, his hand on his heart, looking at the ground, expressing regret that his duty of holding the door imposed his body’s proximity on them. Up until now, women had been authority figures best kept at a deferential distance.

  Rasheed bragged about Max, telling Kelly what a nice boy he was, and how one time a custodian from his school, Irvin, wrote him a letter to note Max’s extraordinary consideration for other children (always letting them cut in front of him at the water fountain, and so on and so on). Max stammered that he didn’t really know what Irvin was talking about. Kelly asked about the nature of his relationship with Irvin.

  “The nature?” Max said.

  “Yeah, do you spend a lot of time together?”

  “With Irvin?” He looked to his father for guidance, but Rasheed gave a puzzled shrug. “Not really.”

  She looked concerned. “I mean, how does he have your address?”

  “There’s a school directory with everyone’s address and phone number.” He felt he’d missed something, made a mistake.

  Rasheed bragged about Kelly to Max now, with noticeable effort. He didn’t seem to know much about her. He stated facts Max could see for himself, like her pale blonde hair, her dress, and her smile. When Rasheed ran out of physical descriptions, he began listing the organizational skills he remembered her having at work and her cordiality with even the rudest of clients on the telephone. She did not appear flattered. Then he turned and asked his son, “Max, what questions do you have for Kelly?” Max came up with very simple ones on the spot: Do you love being a secretary? Do you have pets at home? What are your favorite foods? Colors? TV shows? He learned she did not love being a secretary; her ex-boyfriend whom she still lived with had a pit bull, but she was trying to figure out some way to afford moving out of that situation; she disliked the favorite food and color questions on the basis of it depending on her mood; she watched a lot of documentaries and news, not interested in fictitious stuff.

  The doorbell rang, and Rasheed went to answer.

  Max and Kelly stood silently, listening. Coach Tim could be heard saying, “I need my Wahl beard trimmer, Reed.”

  Rasheed said something back in a hushed tone.

  “Yeah,” Tim shouted, making sure everyone in the house could hear, “well, guess what, Reed? I need my Wahl beard trimmer.”

  Another admonishing, hushed retort from Rasheed.

  “Well,” Tim said, “if it’s not at my house, where the hell else would it be?”

  Rasheed could be heard scream-whispering, “What is your problem now? You don’t even have a beard. Come another time.”

  “I want it now, Reed. I’m not leaving without it.”

  Max had never heard them fight, and had certainly never heard Coach Tim whine like this. Normally, when he came over, it was to eat and watch sports. Rasheed would sit between him and Max on the couch and suddenly become more talkative. To distract himself from feeling eclipsed by Tim, Max got up to prepare snacks for them. Max also learned, and occasionally had to relearn, to be fine with never getting invited to help out with Tim’s house. Tim and Rasheed were aspiring fix-it men, and usually had some home-repair project in the works: tinkering with Tim’s leaky sinks, installing new tiles or a fence, painting, caulking, roofing, lighting, carpeting, etc. Max wondered why they only worked on Tim’s place. And why Rasheed wasn’t motivated to find the time to build the tree house himself. Anyway, Max told himself that when Rasheed and Tim were away together, it gave him more time to work on his own house stuff. Discover a new recipe, for example. He managed to see his aloneness as an opportunity more than anything.

  But while they argued now, Max couldn’t help but notice a light buzz of gratification move through him. He became a little hyper, maybe glad that they were clashing. No, that was wrong. That couldn’t be the reason he was glad. His gladness was probably thanks to Kelly. He looked up at her as she was biting her nails and agreed with himself that she was more likely the reason for his excitement. Rasheed stepped outside and closed the door so Max and Kelly only heard muffled arguing. He bragged a little about his father to her. Maybe when Rasheed came back, he’d understand this to mean that his son supported his pursuit of romance with Kelly, and if she, by virtue of being a woman, had the power to eliminate sadness from his father’s life, then Max would do whatever he could to keep her around.

  “My dad saved a bird once,” he blurted.

  “Is that right?”

  The argument outside ended with Tim tramping across the front yard, repeating, “Fine, fine, you know what, fine.”

  Max continued. “The bird had a broken wing. It was on the sidewalk. It would have gotten eaten by cats. And he just picked it up and talked into its ear and threw it up in the air.”

  “And it flew off?”

  Rasheed marched back into the kitchen with his brow folded like an accordion.

  “Yes,” Max said to her, though that wasn’t how it happened. He now remembered that the bird actually came falling down like a clump of filthy rags.

  “The wing wasn’t broken, then?” she asked, looking at Rasheed.

  “No!” Max said. “Not anymore.”

  “What’s it?” Rasheed said, meaning What’s that?

  Then everyone looked at a different spot on the floor. After an eternity, she asked, “Do you have any music or anything?”

  Music, of course, music! Max and Rasheed rushed over to the one CD collection they had, a boxed set called If You Are American … Tim had given it to them a couple Christmases ago. They’d yet to open it.

  Though Rasheed didn’t listen to music, when Coach came over and they had enough vodka in them, he sometimes took out the copper flute he’d made years before with Tim’s welding gear. Tim said, “Oh, no, oh no, here he comes, it’s that time,” and Rasheed played something distantly similar to “Frère Jacques” as he skipped around the house, laughing into the instrument more than playing it. Tim free-formed baseline vocals and banged on the coffee table, and Max tapped at the back of a pot or an empty bottle with the flats of his fingernails. He couldn’t ever tell if the other two heard his tapping or not, if he was really part of the song. But after one of these impromptu jam sessions, Rasheed surprised Max the following day with a used violin. He handed it to Max, saying, “I think you will self-learn this one nicely.” Max never figured out how to even begin doing that. He spent an hour sitting on his bed, cradling the instrument that his father could have easily rented for the day, without a clue as to how to make a melody come out of it.

  Rasheed read the names off the back of the boxed set to Kelly, “We have Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Michael Jackson, Simon and Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett, and Kate Smith. What’s your preference?”

  “What do you usually listen to?”

  “Oh, everything here is very good,” he said.

  “Yeah, everything here is good,” agreed Max.

  “How about some Stones?” Kelly suggested.

  Rasheed stared at the names a wh
ile. “Ah. The Rolling Stones.”

  She smiled in a sweet way for the first time. “Yeah, that’s great.”

  Rasheed played the music too loudly. Max served up a salad and then the pot au feu that he’d been working on since three o’clock. They slurped and chewed to the blastings of “Brown Sugar.” Max studied Kelly to gauge whether she liked the food or not. He couldn’t tell if she was mildly disgusted or if her scrunched face was one of appreciation. She didn’t look anything like his mother, or at least not the bleary image of her that fluttered in his mind as he ate. He pictured her as having an inviting roundness, short black hair, amber skin, and relaxed caramel ponds for eyes. As much as he batted that image away, it kept flying back at him.

  Kelly asked Rasheed what it was like being an Arab man in the most racist country in the world. It took him a while to hear the question clearly over the Stones.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “It’s a very good country. Our neighbors, the Yangs, for example. They are very successful, the Yangs.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kelly said, spearing a sliced carrot, “that’s not what I’m talking about. You must pick up on the way the media depicts Arabs, right?” He said no, and she wrinkled her forehead. “You’re not conscious of how vilified Arabs are?”

  “Excuse me,” Max said, “what’s vilified Arabs exactly?”

  She didn’t answer and sat through “Paint It Black” and “Wild Horses” looking depressed. She thanked them for the nice food and excused herself before dessert, claiming she had a capoeira class.

  “Capoeira?” asked Rasheed, looking into his bowl. “What is this capoeira? You didn’t say you had capoeira before. Max made a tarte aux fruits.”

  “Sorry. I really have to run.” She patted Rasheed on the shoulder and Max on the head.

  Rasheed came down with the flu later that evening, collapsing on his bed like a groaning, felled tree. He stayed down for two days, missing work.