“This is so fucked,” he said.
“Oh, you have no idea how fucked it is.” Even with her two hands on the chair, her hips lilted back and forth as her head rolled around in little circles. She moaned and sat down in the chair. Vicious again, she said, “What—my sweet, warm, soft, handsome, lovable Max—would you say if I told you he’s lied about all of it? He lied about me and what I’m doing here. That’s right. Time to take responsibility for my part in this. I confess, I shouldn’t have ever come here. He lied about his money. He’s got plenty of it. Yep. Not to worry. And worst of all, he lied all about your mom.” She paused dramatically, seeming to think silence would allow her words to sink in as truth. “Oh, and my personal favorite is that he even lied about what your real name is.”
A hateful buzz whirred in his ears as he held his breath again. “You should go lie down.”
Matter-of-factly, she said, “You’re both too scared to live an honest life. Let me break it down for you.”
“I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, right, okay, I see. You don’t believe me, right?” She stood back up in an attempt to be intimidating.
He took a step closer, preparing to catch her if she fell. “You haven’t said anything.”
“Exactly wrong!” she pointed a shaky finger at him. “I’m saying everything! You’re just not listening! It’s important to listen, Maxie. Are you ready to listen?” She planted both hands on the table and slowly sat herself back down. “Jesus, you have no idea. So fucking sad.” She slapped at the table like an infant demanding food. “So fucking sad so fucking sad so fucking sad so fucking sad!” He’d seen his father smashed a hundred times, but never like this. She eventually spoke coherently again. “You’re a teenager, for Christ’s sake, and he treats you like a baby, like an actual baby that can’t understand anything. And you let him. You’re such a special kid. You’re such a good boy—but it’s time to grow up and see what kind of person he really is. You deserve the best, Max; you deserve to know about your mom and what he’s done to give you this precious fake life you have. That’s what I’m really trying to tell you about here.” She gagged a couple of times. “Don’t look at me like that, you little fucker. Is it all really so hard to believe? Are you really that goddamn blind?”
He breathed somewhat normally again, relieved that she didn’t have anything substantial to say. “It’s like three in the afternoon. You should go lie down. Sleep it off.”
Tenderly, she said, “You know what else?”
“You still haven’t said anything.” He went over and put her arm over his shoulder to get her up and take her to the bed. He was sorry for her, and that felt incredibly good.
“You don’t think it’s screwy he pretends to not be from where he’s from?” She smelled like old flip-flops. “Level with me. In all honesty, you never once thought about that as being a little off?” Letting her feet drag, she said, “Oh, and he’s not just a self-hating Arab. To your father, the only things lower than conniving terrorist Arabs are black people.” Max laid her down on her side of the bed and closed her bathrobe. “Have you seen the way he looks at black people? How he talks about them?” Max went to get a bucket to put next to the bed. She shouted to make sure he could hear her from the bathroom. “For some reason, Asians are immune to his pecking order! Good for the fucking Yangs, right?” Her laugh was interrupted by more gagging. This time it came all the way up. She puked corn chips and vodka and bile into the bucket Max had brought just in time.
These words, racist, lying, self-hating, were too absurd and unspecific to worry about, like the baseless, generic insults kids used at school all the time: fag ass, mother fucker, punk bitch. Kelly lifted her head and with gravelly overtiredness said, “He’s a fucking racist, please tell me you at least see that part? Just as a starting point. It’s going to kill me if you don’t at least see that. Think, Max. Learn to think. I know you see it.”
New bubbles swelled his throat. “That’s all very interesting, Kelly,” he said. “Maybe you can tell me what you’re doing here with this racist then?”
She let her head fall heavily to the pillow and shut her eyes. “Your daddy’s right to treat you like a baby. You’re too young to get any of this.” He started to close the door. “But Max, when you do grow up, just ask him. You never ask him a fucking thing. You must have questions. I know you do, it’s written all over your naive face.” He closed the door and heard her say, “Ask him about your mom, Max!”
With this, she’d stomped and cracked a sealed casket deep inside of him.
While Kelly slept, Max came across Mr. Yang’s business card and decided to give him a ring. Mr. Yang asked if he’d gone out of town, and Max said, “No, I’m still next door.”
“Oh,” Mr. Yang said. Max asked how his flowers were doing. “They are very well, thank you.”
“And what about Mrs. Yang?”
“Oh, she is doing very well too.”
“How about Robby?”
“Oh, Robby is a very happy young man.”
“Good, Mr. Yang, that’s good.” Max said. “But let me ask you something,”
“Ready.”
“If a person did something bad a long time ago, but they’re generally good now, do you think that means they’re still pretty good, and so it doesn’t really matter what they did in the past?”
“Hm.” Mr. Yang didn’t answer for so long that if it hadn’t been for Robby singing in the background, Max would have thought they’d gotten disconnected. “It depend on how bad maybe,” he finally said. Max heard him snipping away at a small tree or plant.
“Well, I don’t really know how bad exactly. Let’s say it could be anything.”
“Impossible to judge anything.”
“Okay, let’s say this person killed like twenty people, but like twenty years ago or something. And ever since then he’s been good, and really wishes he hadn’t killed all those people. And wants to just forget about it all.”
“Twenty people a lot of people. A lot of people with a lot of family.”
“I guess even killing one person is kind of a lot, in a way. Okay, what about if someone is hiding secrets from his own family?”
“That depend. Why is he hiding them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it to protect them or to protect himself?”
“Them.”
“That might be all right.”
“And if it’s to protect himself?”
“This is less honorable.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Mr. Yang, I’ve got to go feed Rocket now.”
“Max?”
“Yes?”
“I think all that matter is that he a good man now.”
“Who is?” Max asked, suspicious of Mr. Yang knowing something he didn’t. “Who’s a good man now?”
“Does not matter. Anyone.”
“Huh. Okay. What about wife-beaters?”
“Sorry?”
“A man who hits his wife. Or is like really mean to her. That’s seriously bad.”
“Yes, it is a terrible thing. Max, is something wrong at home?”
He briefly inspected the kitchen, checking that the table was in its usual place in the corner, the fridge looked stable enough, the window intact, nothing overtly broken. “No, why?”
“Come over to visit soon.”
“I will.”
After hanging up, he went to lie down on the floor next to his bed. Rocket waddled over and clambered on top of him, clumsily setting her front paws on his thighs and her hind paws on his chest. Once she’d found her footing, he patted her side as she panted proudly at the closed bedroom door, like an explorer on a raft, nearing the mainland. Her tail brushed back and forth across his face.
He needed to tell his father Rodney had been in the house. He knew that. But when he saw Rasheed in the kitchen that night, his cheeks still discolored from Rodney’s hand, Max was incapable of giving him bad news. Instead he
walked out the back door and climbed up into his masochistic space.
Ten minutes later, Rasheed came up into the tree house and lay down next to him. It was the first time they’d been up there together at night. A little moonlight glowed through the tiny window. Just as Max had decided to tell his father about Rodney—here and now, under cover of this dark box, no excuses—he heard himself ask about his mother: “Did you and my mom get along?”
“Sure. Like two of the best peas.”
“So you were nice to each other? Even up until the end?”
“That’s right. We were always very nice to each other.”
“Until the robber came?” Max felt younger than his age. He spoke with a babyish register, wanting to be coddled with reassurances.
“Yes.”
“Why did the robber kill everyone? Why would he do that? Why didn’t he just rob them and leave?”
“I already told you about this,” Rasheed said.
“Kelly says I should ask you again.”
“She did? What else did she say?” He sounded livid.
“Just that.”
“What else did she say, Max?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Rasheed took a lot of deep breaths. “You know, Max, you have been thirteen years old for some days.”
“Yeah.”
“You will be fourteen someday.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I will tell you about something. There are parts you don’t know about.” Of course, Max didn’t know most of the parts.
“Yes.” Max sat up and rested his back against the wall under the tiny window, anxious for the story to seize him. He felt it could develop his life into something clear and important.
“Okay. But do you know why I am telling you this?”
“Because—”
“No. Because I don’t ever want to have to speak it again.”
“Okay.”
“All right. Your mother and I lived in Ras Beirut,” he started. “We were best friends. We grew up together. She was a sunshine, you know. She studied political science at AUB and was very smart, very radiant, very brave. Everyone in West Beirut loved her. We made a baby, this was you, and she loved it very much.” He said the word loved as if it choked him.
“Where did you two meet, in a class?” Max asked.
“This is not the story I am telling now.”
“Okay.”
“In the beginning of the war,” he continued, “we lived in my parents’ home. My father was a dentist, you see. I helped him when I wasn’t at school, and then assisted him full time when I graduated.”
“I thought you studied economics.”
“I did. My father,” he said with a declarative finger pointing at the ceiling, “Muhammad Imad el din Boulos, was the most famous dentist in Ras Beirut. Everyone knew him. We lived in a very nice building—al-Nada building—very near to AUB. In less than five years, the people of this building—the rich people, the journalist people, the Saudis and Gulfies—fled away because of the war.
“My father would not leave the country. He said, Why should we be chased by the idiots running around with guns, and so on and so on. The apartment was also my father’s dentist office, and he continued to receive patients in our home on the sixth floor. He thought the war was about to end, always sure that in a week or two it would be ending.
“Refugees, homeless people, and snipers took over the empty apartments.” Rasheed’s eyes scanned the black ceiling. They shone and swept like flashlights whenever he got immersed in a story, as if seeing it play out in front of him. “We heard the shooting and the bombing often. The top apartment of the building had a swimming pool on the roof. When the rich family left that apartment, it transformed into a bordello.”
“A what?”
“Where prostitutes work. We heard the parties they had with different militia until the early morning. One day a rocket went through our window, over the dentist chair—with a patient there—and out the other window. This is when my mother and your mother took you in the bathtub and put cooking pots on their heads.
“There was one pistol in the house, and your mother kept it in the tub in case she needed to protect you from any bad people.” He looked at Max. “Nothing mattered to her but you.”
“And you too, right?”
“Yes, all right, me too,” Rasheed said. “You never cried. We worried you might be a deaf child. Even when that missile flew through the living room and over the chair you did not cry.
“Sometimes I left the apartment and walked up and down the stairs of the building with you in my arms, to let your mother and my mother rest, and so on and so on. Eleven floors, up and down, maybe two or three times per day. You loved these walks too much.”
He raised his hands in front of him and studied them with the horrified gaze of someone who’d strangled an innocent person. Why did he look so guilty? He smelled like an intensified version of himself: musk and sawdust. “We lived with maybe fifteen others in the apartment at a time. Grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends that had no more home. We had many friends. Even friends of friends we didn’t know very well. Different militia would also come and get their teeth checked. In the middle of the war. Imagine. They respected these appointments. Not always, but yes, mostly always.”
“They paid your father?”
“No. My poor father, not so many paid him for his services. And sometimes the militiamen did surprise us, men with guns who wanted their teeth cleaned early because they were moving to another part of the city or something. Some of them kept on masks that they lifted past their mouths. But because we lived in Ras Beirut, these were all leftist Muslim groups that fought for the same side. The city was divided in this way. It did not feel very risky to have different militiamen coming and going. We knew them from before. These were the same boys I went to grade school with. They were taxi drivers or fruit vendors or concierges in the neighborhood. They came in to check for the cavities or maybe to make the gums stop hurting.
“Your mother and I decided we had to leave this place. She wanted to take you away and join with her parents in Paris. They had left years before. All she cared for was getting you to safety. You were the center of her life, you see? And now she said, Enough is enough, we must leave this bathtub, we must leave Beirut. We must leave this crazy country.” He swallowed at the height of a big breath. Max recognized this as a technique to overcome a lump in the throat. “During a pause in the fighting—there was a pause for two hours every day so people could do their food shopping, and so on and so on—I walked to an MEA travel agency.”
“The fighting stopped? Like, for lunch?”
“Yes. Why not? There were usually no mortars during these pauses, and I was lucky because the phone lines were working, so the MEA agent sent a telex to the airline, and like this we had a flight to Paris the next day. I was very excited to tell your mother. We had to pray that there would be no big problems before leaving. But on the walk back, two boys with guns took me into the parking garage underneath our building.”
Max sat up straighter. “What did they want?” he asked, guessing one of these two was the robber who would kill his mother and the others later in the story.
Rasheed didn’t answer for a while. He turned and a bit more moonlight hit his face. The grooves at the corner of his eye looked like a fan of spears. “They were very confused boys. It was strange that two rightist Christians would dare be in the middle of Ras Beirut like this. They wore big crucifixes. Maybe it was some kind of suicide mission, or maybe they wanted to prove something to their leaders. I don’t know. Anyway, they were disguised as poor civilians, and frightened and very nervous, and so young. Maybe fifteen or sixteen years old only. They said to me, ‘We know Abdul al-Masri has made an appointment to get his teeth cleaned. Tell us when he is coming.’ They were talking about some leader in the local Mourabitoun militia. I said I did not
know when Abdul al-Masri had an appointment—I did not even know who that man was—but if he is an important man, he will not come to our office, he will send for my father. They said they still wanted to know when was his appointment. I told them, ‘Okay, let me go upstairs and check and I will come back to tell you.’ They said, ‘No, we must come up with you and stay until Abdul al-Masri comes.’ I said, ‘Do not do this. Everyone will know you are not my friends.’ But they told me this was not my choice.”
“How did they know that this guy had an appointment?” Max said.
“Someone who stayed with us must have sold the information, or told another person who told another person. So I took them upstairs and introduced these boys as friends and said they will stay with us for some days before moving on and trying to make it to Syria. Everyone knew this was not true, and became very afraid that these rude boys now lived with us. One of them never left my side, and the other stood always with my father. They studied the appointment book and saw that the man they were looking for was scheduled to get a root canal in two weeks. The boys became very loud and angry with my father because they wanted him to explain how he knew Abdul al-Masri needed a root canal. It was true, it is unbelievable that Abdul al-Masri knew by himself that he needed this operation and made an appointment for two weeks later.”
“So how—”
“It means my father had looked inside Abdul al-Masri’s mouth before. Maybe he had come in dressed as a layperson or maybe my father went and visited him one day during a truce, we can never always learn the true story.
“The rude boys didn’t trust my father and decided to stay two weeks until the appointment. We had the flight the next day and I could not even go into the bathroom and be alone to tell your mother about this. I didn’t want to tell these boys we were leaving. I couldn’t know what this would make them do, if they would become angry, or want to take the tickets or money or what. They became more and more paranoid.
Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel Page 10