You Deserve Nothing

by Alexander Maksik

  * * *

  Friday after school I walked with Colin to the métro. It wasn’t planned. We simply didn’t avoid each other. I’d seen him before, walking ahead, lighting a cigarette as he passed through the gates, calling a casual good-bye to the guards. Countless times I’d walked behind him among other kids wandering along the street, laughing and shouting, free from school. We poured out of there. The joy of temporary freedom. And I didn’t mind those walks alone, among but not with the rest of them. I liked watching and not participating. It made me feel stronger, and for months I was convinced that I wasn’t lonely. I also liked to be alone because I thought it might endear me to Silver, whom I’d occasionally see walking with other kids, waving, exchanging jokes with other kids as he made his way quickly away from school.

  Perhaps he’d find me more interesting if I were alone, pensive, pondering great ideas—a young philosopher, an independent mind. But at best, he patted my shoulder in passing. See you tomorrow, Gilad. See you tomorrow.

  So that Friday, finding myself side by side with Colin as we left the school, I was surprised by how grateful I was for his company.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Then I was as they were. Which is to say with someone else. All those months of isolation, all those months alone, and then here was Colin.

  He offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.

  “I should quit,” he told me. “Silver’s always giving me shit about smoking.”

  “Really?” I felt a shot of jealousy.

  “Yeah, you know. We had this talk one day where he said how I thought I was a rebel for smoking. Like, I was all tough smoking cigarettes. And then he gives me this whole lecture about how smoking is totally not rebellious, about the tobacco industry or some shit. He was fucking right too. As always. So anyway, I’m going to quit. I’m trying to.” He laughed.

  I waited for the jealousy to pass. The sense of betrayal even. As if, all this time, Silver had been mine alone.

  I said, “You know the day that guy was killed, Silver took me to a café. We spent the afternoon there.”

  Colin looked at me, “Yeah? That must have been intense, man. Seeing a guy like that. Fucked up.”

  “Yeah it was.”

  “What’d it sound like?”

  “I don’t know. It was. To be honest? The noise was hidden by the sound of the train. It was fast. Then there was nothing. Then there was crunching. Like branches being broken in half. But all of it was kind of far away. Like it was underwater. Or I was. I don’t know.”

  “Fuck,” he said and glanced at me sideways. He seemed impressed.

  We walked quietly for a while, Colin blowing smoke. We walked down the stairs into the métro.

  “So you going to this protest on Saturday?” he asked as we slumped down into two forward-facing seats.

  “I guess. You?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “We can go together if you want,” I said, after a long pause.

  He nodded. “Yeah, O.K. Sure, that’d be cool. All right. Cool.”

  We exchanged numbers and he got off the train at Nation. He raised his chin at me as the train rushed on. For the first time since arriving at ISF, the fact that it was the weekend meant something to me.

  * * *

  I opened the door. My mom was crying and in the midst of an angry sentence when I walked into the room. My father, in a black suit, red tie in hand, white shirt opened at the collar, stood close to her.

  “Gilad, go to your room, please.”

  He didn’t look at me but instead kept his eyes on my mother, whose expression softened as she saw me.

  I pushed the door closed. It was the first time I’d seen my father in weeks.

  “Gilad, go to your room.”

  I didn’t move. I said nothing. And then he turned to me angrily. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  “I’m not messing around, Gilad. Either get the fuck out of the apartment or go to your room and stay there.”

  They were both looking at me, my mother’s eyes pleading.

  “Gilad, are you fucking deaf?”

  “Don’t talk to him like that.” My mother spoke to the floor. Whatever fury there’d been before I walked in had drained from her. Now this pathetic effort to defend me. He ignored her. I couldn’t move.

  He took a step. My father, a few inches taller than I was, thicker, came forward, careful, hesitant even, as if he didn’t want to leave my mother alone where she was.

  “Gilad,” he said again, “I’m not fucking around. This isn’t your problem. Get out.”

  I met his eyes and didn’t look away. I felt as if I might dissolve. I needed to keep looking. If I broke the whole thing might fall, whatever balance there was, whatever was keeping us all still. I couldn’t look away.

  “Touch him and you’ll never see me again,” she said. This time in a stronger voice, gathering whatever she could of herself.

  And then, still looking at me, he took a quick step toward my mother, swung his right arm backward, and struck her squarely across the face. It was as graceful and precise a stroke as every sweeping backhand I’d ever watched him hit on tennis courts around the world. There was a dull, flat sound. My mother gave a slight contained cry, a fast expulsion of breath. And it seemed as if his eyes had never left mine. He opened his mouth wider as if to speak. At first, nothing, and then, softly, “Do you understand me, Gilad?”

  I wanted, with everything in me, to leap at him. I could see it. Feel my fist crushing his jaw. Throwing him through the door. Through the window. Cutting his throat. Tearing him apart. His blood on my knuckles. I felt myself rising to action, building, it was coming, I was tight, I would move, take him by the throat. I’d murder him.

  Instead, I looked away toward my mother who was pretending to be concerned rather than afraid. She raised her head slightly and we looked at each other. Then I looked above her head, through the window. There was cold sky behind her. The branch of a plane tree coming and going in the window. Trees beyond bending in the gusting wind. A piece of wire dangling from a rooftop, twirling behind the double-glazed glass. I saw Sacré Coeur, silent and pale in the far distance, pasted to the sky.

  “Gilad, get the fuck out.”

  Ignoring him, I looked back at her. A spill of red rising across her right cheek, flecks of blood on her lips. Her eyes dull.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to me. And again, “I’m sorry.”

  In that apology I found my escape. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my job.

  So I left them there.

  * * *

  That night I stayed in my room. I pissed out the window into the courtyard below. I read. I walked back and forth. I held the door handle. Imagined opening it. Breaking down their door. Cross the fucking room. Dig down. Push. Go.

  But I was a coward. I stayed where I was. I looked out into the night and put it all away. I looked out my window and knew that Silver, somewhere in the city, was in his apartment. He’d be reading. Listening to John Coltrane or something. Or at his desk, grading papers. Writing poems maybe. The light low, a beautiful bare-shouldered woman reading on the couch. There he was living his honorable life. I saw it clear as anything.

  I thought about the morning, about meeting Colin. The next day we’d fight. We’d fight against something important. Tomorrow we’d be brave.

  * * *

  I woke up very early and left. Their bedroom door was closed. In the weak morning light, everything looked as it always did, the pillows on the couch returned to order.

  And then one day you live in France.

  I stepped out onto the rue de Tournon. I ran to Boulevard St. Germain and turned east. I kept running. It was a little after six and the streets were quiet. Cafés were opening, tired waiters lining the sidewalk terraces with chairs, smoking their morning cigarettes. I ran past the street cleaners dressed in green, sweeping away last night’s trash. I ran to the Pont de Sully. I ran unt
il I was exhausted. I opened my coat and began to walk, the chill morning air cooling the sweat on my chest, my face, the back of my neck. I crossed the bridge and stopped to watch the sunrise over the dull industrial buildings to the east. I walked up Boulevard Henri IV until I came to the Place de la Bastille and took a table at the Café Français. Waiters were still arranging chairs when I sat down. The wind was very cold. I ordered a crème and a croissant. The waiter didn’t speak. The coffee and milk came in separate steel pitchers, both scalding hot, and the croissant was still warm. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. I ate very fast and then, remembering Silver, poured the coffee and milk very slowly.

  The first thing I thought after my hunger had subsided and the coffee began to brighten me was that he’d approve. He’d like that I was sitting there alone, so early in the morning, paying such careful attention to simple, beautiful things. Paris morning, coffee, milk, pitcher. His imagined approval made me feel as if it would be O.K. Whatever was wrong, it would be O.K.

  They had nothing to do with me. My mother had made her own choices and she continued to make them. What did that have to do with me? She’d married him. She’d given up. She stayed. My life was my own, I’d soon be free of them, and my anger, my new easy conviction, propelled me into the day.

  I opened my backpack and found The Stranger. How proud he’d be of me sitting alone in the cold morning, the book on the table next to the remains of my breakfast. All alone, the day unfolding. I moved the book with its uncracked spine as if arranging the subject of a still life, moving a cup this way, an ashtray the other.

  From my backpack I took out the French poche version I’d bought at L’Ecume des Pages. I would read it first, make clever observations about translation and how much more I’d enjoyed the novel in its original language.

  Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.

  Those first words. I was wide-awake. It’s embarrassing even now, after all the time that’s passed. How many teenagers had fallen for that book by the time I found it? But I didn’t know and I suppose that’s to his credit. He never told us and I didn’t think to ask.

  The whole scene had been done—the Gauloises and the black turtlenecks—but to me then it was a secret gift handed to us one Friday afternoon at the beginning of our lives.

  I read the way you read when you’re young. I believed that everything had been written for me, that what I saw, felt, learned, was discovery all my own. I read for hours without rest. That man who barely flinches at the news of his mother’s death—that morning he let me abandon my own mother, to leave her, without guilt, to her own life, her own choices.

  When I looked up, it was nearing eleven. I ordered an omelette and another coffee. The café had begun to fill. I was surprised to find people around me, reading newspapers, chatting. I was part of that place, part of that moment, one Saturday morning. I didn’t think about the night before. I shut it out. Camus was mine that day. Silver had given him to me. Meursault and all the rest.

  I walked up Boulevard Beaumarchais, hands deep in my coat pockets. Close to Place de la République, there were dark blue police vans lining the Boulevard du Temple, hundreds of them it seemed, riot police strapping on their armor, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee from thermoses, preparing themselves calmly for battle. I saw one brushing his teeth, spitting into the gutter. I took my time so I could watch them.

  Those men were strong, waiting for a violence certain to arrive.

  Later they’d use their batons, their fists. They’d be attacked, barraged with bottles. They’d throw people to the ground.

  There were already signs on the statue of la République. People milled around, waiting for the protesters who would march en masse from Bastille. The wind had picked up and was blowing leaves across the square. Groups of kids hung around wearing the Paris street-tough uniform of the day—nylon track suits, pants tucked into white socks, fanny packs slung around their waists, and little caps worn backward, or with hoods thrown over their heads. A crowd was gathered at the base of the statue looking up at some boys who’d climbed halfway to the top and were hanging a large banner—“Anti-Bush/Anti-Guerre.” There were girls sitting on top of a bus stop drinking beer. Pretty students with peace signs painted on their cheeks wandered through the crowd handing out anti-globalization stickers. Vendors sold merguez from a makeshift grill.

  It felt like a carnival, the crowd so young. They were jubilant. I’d never been to a protest and I was thrilled to be in the midst of so much enthusiasm, all those kids, not much older than me, singing, chanting, and hating the United States together. A girl wearing a military cap, her hair in pigtails and a T-shirt—fuckUSA—smiled at me. When I smiled back she pushed a T-shirt into my hands and insisted I put it on. I tried to refuse but she was too beautiful. I pulled it over my head. She kissed me on the cheek and danced into the crowd.

  There were banners everywhere. Signs plastered to walls, bus stops, and lampposts. People were pouring in from every direction. Traffic had been stopped and the wide streets were a mass of protesters. There was a constant buzz of sound and motion and all of it seemed to be accelerating as I made my way across the place to meet Colin. In my new T-shirt I felt connected, part of the wild crowd around me.

  They raised their fists in the air. “FuckUSA,” they chanted, laughing.

  “Oui mon vieux,” a bearded man said as he passed.

  “Non à la guerre, non à la guerre,” people sang.

  “La paix, pas le sang, la paix, pas le sang, la paix, pas le sang.”

  There was the faint sound of far-off chanting and the steady beating of drums.

  Colin came up the steps, out of the métro, lighting a cigarette. He grinned when he saw the T-shirt.

  “In the spirit aren’t you, mate?”

  “Find the right girl and you can have your own.”

  I put my hand out to shake his but he slapped my palm twice, and then offered me his fist. I followed his lead and touched my knuckles to his. He laughed his sharp laugh and shook his head at my clumsiness.

  “Don’t get out much do you?”

  We’d started walking and I looked straight ahead. “I’m out all the time,” I told him.

  “Yeah? I never see you clubbing, man. Or at the Champs.”

  “Not really my thing.”

  “That’s cool. So where do you go?”

  “I don’t know, just out in the city. Walk around. Go to cafés. I listen to music sometimes. You know.”

  He gave me a look and nodded his head as if coming to understand something. “You’re a bit of a fucking loner then aren’t you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe,” I said. “I guess.”

  “I mean that’s cool. Most of those fucking cunts at school aren’t worth your time anyway. That’s sort of Silver’s trip, you know? Being fucking in it. Out there. Connected and shit. Not wasting your time with fucking idiots, doing fuck all.”

  The way he spoke made me nervous. Walking with him I felt polite, mild. Colin spit. Flicked his cigarettes into the street. Swore. Talked loudly. He was tight and angry and I was drawn to him, envious of his disregard for the world, his easy swagger. I was also embarrassed by him, by his crassness, the amount of sidewalk he took up, the volume of his voice and even by his clothes. He dressed like a kid from the banlieue, those white nylon track pants tucked into his socks. He had the same bravado, the same arrogant gait.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s what I’m trying to do, you know. Like he says, ‘live bravely,’ fight against, I don’t know, whatever.” I glanced over at him sideways as we walked, expecting him to laugh. I felt like a fraud, but he just nodded.

  “It is brave. The way you’re doing it. Going it alone. That’s a hard fucking life though, man. What about girls? You have a girlfriend?” He looked at me and then said, “You’re into girls, right? You don’t have a fucking boyfriend, right mate?”


  “No,” I told him. “No boyfriend.”

  “And?”

  “No girlfriend,” I said.

  “Fucked up, man. I know there are chicks at school who’d fuck you. You’re that mysterious kid. They love that shit. Even if you have some of that Columbine thing, man, chicks fucking love mystery.”

  I laughed.

  “So what’s up?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, really. I’m just. I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to do something else. I’m tired. Like I’m a hundred years old. Like I was born bored. Bored of people anyway. I don’t know. I’d like to meet someone wild. Interesting.”

  Which was half true. But despite my desperate, painful, adolescent sexual desire, I never had anything to say to the girls who smiled at me. I was in a constant state of longing. My body hummed with need and all of that yearning, that stifled desire—to fuck, to tear the apartment to pieces, to escape, to break my father’s jaw—the only relief came while I was lying in bed at night. There, with my eyes closed, I’d draw an image from my memory—one of those ISF girls running to class, or lying in the sun, or raising her hand—and I’d masturbate angrily until I fell asleep. Often it was Ariel, late in the afternoon, the school empty. I’d bend her over Silver’s desk and fuck her violently from behind. Or little giggling blond Julia, always talking with Silver out on the field, she’d be on her knees in front of me in the bathroom, her hair in my fist, or Marie de Cléry with her famous breasts heavy in my hands. There was an invariable violence to those fantasies and with every ejaculation came the slight release of rage, the faintest relief from anger. In my bed, in the shower, even once in a bathroom stall at ISF, I’d grit my teeth and masturbate until the skin was raw and still the erections would return again and again.

  “Silver’s fucking alive. I’ll bet that guy is crazy wild,” Colin said.