by Dima Alzayat
I took the steps two at a time and found her bent over the television. ‘I wanna move it to the kitchen, Ben. Tired of all this walking back and forth.’ If she had looked at my face for even an instant she would’ve known right then and there what I’d done but she was struggling to get a firm hold of the thing. ‘Come on, try to get the other side.’ It was heavy, that television, the kind built into a wooden console as if it didn’t have a right to exist alone, had to be disguised as a piece of familiar furniture first. It was too cumbersome to pick up but impossible to push. Our difference in size didn’t help either. Even after getting it up, we had to put it down and re-lift every few steps. The sweat stood on her brow and her dress clung to her like cling film. I would’ve felt sorry for her if I wasn’t so worried about the trouble I’d be in if she knew. While we took a break to catch our breaths she asked after Ralph and I told her he was on the stairs with Tommy. I pretended I knew that for certain. Wanted to believe I knew that for certain. Enough time had passed.
When we’d finally moved the damn thing into the kitchen, just as she raised her head and turned her eyes to meet mine, I made for the door. ‘Fetch Ralph and Tommy and come back up here. That’s enough for one day.’ I left without answering, nearly fell twice running, slipped and slid down the last few stairs. When I got to the ground floor, the big door was shut. I stood there a moment, confused, even turned around and looked back at the staircase, somehow expecting to find Tommy and Ralph standing there, waiting. But I was alone.
I pulled open the door and though I’d not been gone all of maybe fifteen minutes, already the light was changing – the way it seems to grow brighter right before it turns purple and disappears altogether. To my right a couple stood, arguing. The man was calling the woman names that to this day I don’t like to repeat and she was swinging at him as he cursed. The man started to turn toward me so I glanced past him toward the fruit stand where a mother paid for a bag of mango slices for her daughter, lit a cigarette for herself. I turned my head in the other direction but aside from a mangy cat rummaging through the trash, the sidewalk was empty. Taxis and cars honked at one another on the street, their headlights coming on pair by pair as the light faded. My chest felt tight and flat, like the whole of the sky was pressing down on it, like I was no more than God’s rolling board.
I stepped out onto the pavement and heard the door slam behind me before I realized that I had no way back in without buzzing my mother. The arguing couple were walking away now and the mother and daughter were crossing the street. I scanned the sidewalk in both directions two, three times and just started running toward the stand, rounded the corner and picked up speed. Everywhere I looked, my eyes sought Ralph, tried to remember what color shirt he was wearing, whether it was blue or green, the one with Batman or the Joker. I began to feel faint and sick like when you eat too much or not enough, like I was full and empty all at the same time.
I ran until I realized I’d circled the block three times and each time I saw new faces and the same faces but with something new about them. A scarred cheek, crooked teeth, sunburned skin. I looked them directly in the eyes, searched for some clue as to where Tommy and Ralph had gone, of who had seen them, who had taken them.
On my fourth time around, the fruit vendor had started to pack up his goods and nodded to me as I passed. With each step I took, what light remained seemed to scatter even faster, eager to leave the world or at least my part of it, and I became less afraid of what my mother would do to me and more frightened for Ralph and what the sorcerer would do to him. I remember wishing that something big would happen, like a tornado or an earthquake, just so it would be bigger than what was happening then. The only thought that kept me from screaming right there on the sidewalk was that I had to keep running. That, and I knew Tommy had to be with him, that Tommy would follow that sorcerer to his dungeon and save Ralph, and Etan too. He’d free them and tie up the sorcerer in their place.
Thirty minutes later, I sat on the kitchen floor, huddled in a corner while police officers went in and out of the apartment, their radios buzzing with codes only they understood. My father had gone out with a search group scouring the neighborhood on foot. Tommy’s parents had returned; his mother stood in the hallway outside our apartment screaming at the cops to go find her son while his father sat in our kitchen with his head in his hands.
Over and over the same police officer kept asking me to repeat the story, how I’d left Tommy and Ralph on the ground floor, that maybe we had opened the door to let in air, that maybe we had taken turns going outside for just a few minutes at a time. The questions kept coming – the same ones with the words rearranged, until my mother turned to the officer and said Stop. But even then she wouldn’t look me in the eye. That’s how I remember my mother to this day, though she’d live another twenty years before dying from too many cigarettes. She kept pressing the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, pressed so hard I thought she’d push a hole right through. She stopped only to hold up a picture of Ralph the cops had asked to see. ‘No, he’s not blond. It was the light in the photo studio. Made everything look different,’ she kept repeating.
Neighbors showed up in turn at our door offering to pray with us and though I never knew my mother to miss a Sunday mass, she told them they’d be more useful walking the streets, searching. But I prayed anyway. Jumbled together Hail Marys and Our Fathers, promised to give Ralph my toys, to never want another thing again if only he’d appear. At some point, a cop asked me to come down to the landing, to show him exactly where we were playing, to describe who stood where and when. I looked to my mother and though she nodded, still her eyes refused mine.
A few cops stood on the ground level of the building, the door now wide open. I could make out a news truck and reporters, more cops and neighbors. A woman in a red blazer noticed me then and rushed toward the building. The cops quickly filled the doorway and stood between us. Still, I could see her peering over their shoulders as others joined her – a mass of shifting microphones and cameras and voices. The officers ordered them to step away from the door and pulled me back but not before I heard one of them ask if I’d witnessed the disappearance.
When the cops found Ralph tied up in the basement, my mother let out a cry so loud and terrible, a long howl that waned into a low moan. They walked in on Tommy holding the plastic gun and Ralph’s head welted where Tommy’d struck him with it. Ralph sat shirtless in that chair, his arms and legs bound, his Fantastic Four tee gagging his mouth. Dried tears ran in streaks down his neck and his pants were soaked, the stench of piss filling the room. When the cops led him through the door of our apartment and into my mother’s arms, he turned to me for no more than an instant and though his eyes neither twitched nor blinked, I understood them.
I don’t know what became of Tommy. His parents moved out the next day and the apartment stayed empty for months. That night, my mother bathed Ralph for nearly an hour while my father stood in the doorway and watched over them both without speaking. I sat in the hallway, waiting, until my father turned to me and said it was time for bed.
I lay in the darkness and looked across at Ralph’s bed, wondered what Etan’s bed looked like, empty like that, night after night. I waited for what felt like hours and crept out of bed and down the hallway. My parents’ bedroom door was open and I could see my father asleep in his work shirt. In the kitchen, the spaghetti sat on the table, untouched. I found my mother in the living room, Ralph wrapped in a towel and asleep on her lap. I sat next to her and for a long time I couldn’t be sure if she was awake or asleep, her breaths low and far in between, her eyes difficult to see in the darkness. Then, at around dawn, when the shadows in the room began to shift and I could make out her face and she could make out mine, she pulled me toward her.
ONLY THOSE WHO STRUGGLE SUCCEED
It was the night of the office Christmas party and Lina felt lucky and excited to be included as she was merely an intern, although there had been allusions to, if not
promises of, a permanent position in the new year. Because she lived an hour’s drive away, and because she had to go into the office the day of the party, there was the question of how she would get ready for the outing. Her roommate reminded her that a gym membership they shared, a gift to the roommate from parents who found the roommate’s weight bothersome, was the solution to her dilemma. So, after a day of reading scripts and writing notes that summarized their strengths and weaknesses, going on coffee runs and picking up lunches, Lina said, ‘See you later,’ to her co-workers, and went to the closest gym to which the membership allowed her access and made use of its showers and changing room. She blow-dried her hair straight and carefully flat-ironed and sprayed the fine hairs that framed her forehead and which she knew would otherwise frizz and curl in the party venue’s humid indoor air. It was a nervous energy that filled her as she applied her makeup, and she recognized it as one of anticipation, the same she had felt several times before. To her it signaled that her ambitions and desires, to secure for herself a role in the company and gain acceptance into an industry that was derided in public and celebrated in private for being discriminatory and exacting, were ones she could access and with time obtain. She felt in that moment the very potential of her life revealed. Before leaving the locker-room she looked at herself in the mirror a final time, felt satisfied with the pale gold shadow that brightened her eyes, and wiped off the red lipstick she had previously thought festive but which now she deemed made her lips appear too prominent and defined.
The party was held in a bar closed to the public for the occasion, and when she entered her co-workers were glad to see her, and she spoke to men and women who in the office spoke only to one another or to their own assistants. As she made her way around the room, she was welcomed into the various intimate groups that formed, reshuffled and formed again, and was included as gossip was exchanged about people whom she did not know, but whose names she recognized enough to allow her to join in on the laughter that ensued at their expense. Such interactions, she understood, were the blocks required to build relationships which, if they were carefully maintained, could later act as bridges capable of delivering her to the most coveted positions. As she conversed and laughed she began to feel encouraged that the months she had committed to working without pay, complying with requests and orders that were at times intended to humble or diminish her, were in fact worthwhile, and that she was, at last, to be admitted into a life that had initially seemed too extraordinary for someone like her to achieve. She stood near the bar and accepted the drinks handed to her, and later, when the president of the company, for whom she interned directly, and the vice president, who had flown in from New York and stayed for the party, gathered a select few and handed out shots of tequila, she found herself full of verve and jubilance, feelings the gathering evidently inspired within those comprising the small group around her. And thus, though she preferred vodka to tequila, in fact found the latter sickening, she drank it, and then another.
Speaking to a second intern, who was much newer than she was and had been included in the small group taking shots near the bar, Lina learned the girl was completing her last year at a highly esteemed private women’s college on the East Coast. This intern, though polite, did not smile much, and it made Lina aware of the ache in her own cheeks from smiling and laughing widely through the night, and she allowed her face to relax. When the company president sat beside her and the other intern, and discovered where the latter attended college, and where she had been raised, Lina did her best to convey interest and engage in the conversation even though they spoke of a world whose distance from hers made it mystifying and at times unreal. As they spoke, she worried that perhaps this connection, between the president and the intern, would threaten her own chances at a permanent position, and would make inconsequential the time she had devoted. Her education at a public university, well ranked, but public nonetheless, and large, and which before that moment had been for her the greatest accomplishment of her life, seemed now crude when measured against the finely tailored education of the girl sitting beside her.
When she began to feel drunk, she did not worry. She had, earlier that week, made arrangements to sleep at the apartment of the president’s assistant and his girlfriend following the party. Though she did not particularly like the assistant, as he was selfish and crude, she had with time developed a reluctant fondness for him on account of his dedicated, if compulsive, work ethic, which made him resourceful and energetic, and imbued him with a sense of humor. She also liked that he thought her smart, smarter than the other interns, and trusted her to read scripts other interns were not allowed to see. With time, his trust of her had come to serve his needs primarily, she knew, as she would often be left to cover his desk on his days off and sent scripts to read and provide feedback on in the middle of the night. He told her he would, of course, take credit for some of the work she completed, but that on occasion, when it mattered, and to the president directly, he would credit some of her work to her. He promised also, in return, to help her secure a job, either at the company or elsewhere once she graduated. She had learned, both in college and in previous internships, that this was an industry that operated in such a manner, was not put off by this knowledge, and had in fact been spurred to seek a career within it partly due to its demand and difficulty. Growing up with little money, she believed, had prepared her to work long hours and to live frugally, and she had, on several occasions, felt irked by those people whom she encountered at the various jobs she held in college, in clothing shops and call centers and deli counters, who seemed assured of something large and yet-unknown in her path, as there had been in theirs, and which would keep her from realizing her goals. Their worries and complaints were, she repeated to herself, imagined and self-imposed and particular to them, and, in this way, she remained steadfast in her commitment to succeed.
When the other intern excused herself and left Lina and the company president alone, Lina felt comfortable enough to make a joke and was relieved when he laughed. She had been working for him for five months and though she found him intimidating, it was because of how he carried himself with poise that was notable and rare. Only on occasion, when someone, usually his assistant, made an error that led to his appearing uninformed, did the president raise his voice. This was different, she knew, from the men who owned the company, and the many others like them, who screamed often, and insulted the people who worked below them, and were known to resort to physical violence from time to time. The president, in contrast, was not boorish and had about him an air that was calm and regal. She was happy to speak with him and was happier still when he thanked her for her work, and complimented her on her good taste in film, and inquired about her goals and the career she would like to one day have. They spoke also of family, she keeping to herself that what worried hers most was money, and he sharing with her his struggles to connect with teenagers who, to him, seemed to overnight become different people than the ones they had been as children. After some time, he thanked her for being easy to converse with, and admitted these were not subjects he normally spoke of in such depth. She, in return, complimented him for setting a good example to the people who worked beneath him, and for being measured and kind, especially to the interns. He was taken aback by her words, but she could see he enjoyed them, and he confided in her that his years of focused work had, yes, brought him much success, but at the great price of two failed marriages and a feeling of loneliness he found difficult to describe.
These things Lina would, the next day, remember, but what occurred after was to be captured and recaptured in frames by her mind as it attempted to place in order events she would absorb as random and discrete. They would include the president offering her one of his children’s empty beds for the night; the vice president telling her the assistant had disappeared after a fight with his girlfriend; the lights dimming; the vice president assuring her she would receive a room at the hotel; the bar closing and her gathering
her belongings; the vice president ushering her into the backseat of a chauffeured sedan; the room spinning; the assistant telling her the plan had changed, that he and his girlfriend could no longer host her as planned; the voices slurring; the vice president informing the president that the company had, for the use of employees, reserved rooms at a nearby hotel, whose name she recognized as one located on a well-known boulevard; the faces blurring; the assistant instructing her to get into the car.
When Lina woke and found the vice president on her she wondered if maybe she was imagining him there. There, on her face and neck and hips and thighs, and ‘No,’ she said, and he stopped. Then he was on her again, and the room spun, and she spun with it. His tongue felt like other tongues and she thought maybe, then thought about the tongues she had in the past known and wanted and the distance between such tongues and this one was too vast, and the inability to calculate it overwhelmed her. What was occurring she felt was a sequence of awakenings in which first she noted how the room spun and she with it, followed by him, there, and there. Then, the unnerving feeling of this sequence being one of many, and that somewhere in the room they were stacking, amassing to something that could soon be summed and made whole. Her need to make it stop and him with it brimmed and receded, brimmed and receded, as she woke and slept, and the room spun. Her hope was for the waking to last long enough to flood her, to expel from within her the dismay and dread that kept her soundless, and when finally it did, she saw that her waking, and the awareness that came with it, would in fact be quick to saturate her through and through, and she cried, loud and plenty. This brought the movement above her to a stop, and at last she could feel him not on her and heard him walk away.