Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel

by Karim Dimechkie

  Nadine brought a shower chair from work. They sat Rasheed on it in the tub and washed him with a sponge glove. They had tacitly decided to act as casually and unsentimentally around Rasheed as possible, as though they weren’t overcome by his new condition. At times Max caught himself succeeding at this so well that he stopped thinking of Rasheed as a person. Max cleaned him like a car, naked and slumped in the chair, the water combing his body hair into groves. Only after a good five minutes into the scrubbing—leaning him to one side to get under a butt cheek and then the other, rinsing him down, caring for and forgetting him at the same time while listening to Nadine talk about work as she put almond oil in her hair or brushed her teeth or plucked her eyebrows—did he remember the picture they inhabited: Rasheed a prisoner in his own body, the dependency that humiliated him, how his son had done this to him, and his moans that unquestionably begged for mercy.

  But the hurt caught up to Max most of all when he left Rasheed alone. When he’d gone to do the dishes or take Rocket for a walk, or when he lay in bed with Nadine, waiting for the sleeping pills to take effect. That’s when the injustice and guilt and grief pounded down on him hardest, and he went faint with an impotent rage.

  The moon was full. Its copper light poured through the tiny window and splashed across Nadine’s cheek. She was awake. Max could actually hear her blinking, like hands clapping in on themselves.

  She worried they were getting hooked on the sleeping pills so decided to stop using them for a while. “You want to know how to fall asleep?” she said. “It’s like in that movie.” Her eyes reflected apostrophes of the orange light.

  Max drummed a little beat on his belly. “What movie?”

  “I don’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a war film,” she said, as though there were only a few. “They said the trick is to try as hard as possible to stay awake. And when you convince yourself you absolutely have to stay up, sleep takes you.”

  “But now I know it’s a trick.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why not?” His right eye closed more than the left, the outside corners of his eyelashes crosshatched with sleep.

  “Because I’ve done it before. It’s one of those things that works even when you know you’re lying.”

  The bizarre moonlight made his skin look like an apricot soaked in a jar of water. The glow individualized every distinct hair and crease and birthmark, as if they were separate creatures that just happened to gather on his body for tonight.

  “Then why don’t you do it?” he said. “Why don’t you convince yourself and sleep?”

  “Camaraderie, sweet boy. I’m waiting for you. Once we agree to go through with the plan, we’ll execute it together.”

  “Right.” He clapped his hand on his stomach.

  “Do you want to close the curtain on our prison window up there?” she asked.

  “No, I want to see you,” he said, staring up at the ceiling fan.

  “Oh, so you’re fully awake now?”

  “I’m applying your method.”

  “It doesn’t work if you talk.”

  She rolled into him and let her nose mash up against his shoulder. He turned and yawned into her forehead, letting his teeth bump her skin. She sniffled like she did right before temporarily drifting off.

  They found themselves in improbable positions. Her limbs unhurriedly splayed outward, like a firework exploding in slow motion. She smelled of something that didn’t resemble anything he knew outside of her. She pushed him to an extremity of the bed, Rasheed’s old bed, her feverishly hot knuckle sticking him in the side. When he thought of Rasheed lying in the other room, he was capable of sweating out all his liquids in a matter of seconds. It turned the mattress into a damp sponge.

  An hour or so later, Nadine said, “You still awake?”

  “Yep.”

  “Want to know what I was thinking?”

  “You know I do.”

  “I was thinking, why is reincarnation always about becoming animals or plants?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we turned into other stuff? Like a shock of electricity or a gust of wind or something.”

  He looked at her profile. She beamed with discovery and said, “I could be reincarnated as a thought. Or a note in a laugh. A single strand of sunshine. The very end of a taste!”

  Max loved her more viscerally in this moment than the one before. As he pressed his wet cheek against her shoulder, he observed an entire lifetime. His hand gravitated to her chin, cupping it from below. His fingers grew up her face, caging her lips. She kissed and then nibbled the meat of his palm and scooted it up with her nose to her brow. His fingers lay on her hair like a lazy benediction.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” he said. “I’ll never fall asleep again.”

  The night carried on like a lost boat on placid water.

  TWENTY

  Coach Tim brought birds. Two mosaic canaries. He said Rasheed loved birds. Max had no idea but embraced such new bits of information. Tim looked bad: chalky skin, black circles around red eyes, an overall droopiness.

  Max pointed him to where Rasheed slept. He heard Tim set the cage down among the plants, and soon after, listened to him wail like a trumpeting elephant. When it had quieted down in there, Max peeked in. Tim looked weirdly effeminate nestling his nose into Rasheed’s neck, lying on his side with his legs drawn up to his chest, whimpering and smiling and half sleeping all at once. The same man who shouted drill sequences on the court, who had talked to Max and his teammates before a game with the vehemence of sending kids off to war—telling them to go out there and play for their school, their loved ones, and sometimes even their country. He drank American beer, used sports analogies, tucked his bright polos into light blue jeans, and shielded his bald head with that Spurs cap. Coach Tim, melting desperate against Rasheed’s diminished body. Rocket mewled from her plant-encircled bed, and the canaries chirped like a pedestrian walk sign.

  Images of Tim and Rasheed kissing, cuddling, and having sex changed the meaning of all those nights Rasheed came home doe-eyed and drunk, not knowing how to look at Max, and ready for sleep. Max had once interpreted these looks on Rasheed’s face as his needing a woman. Seeing Tim transformed the way he thought about Rasheed’s body. He’d never considered it a sexual entity, and this added an extra dimension to the tragedy, to what Max had taken away.

  Rasheed’s eyes were closed, but Max could tell he wasn’t sleeping. The deadened half of him faced the wall, so he looked a lot like his old self from Max’s angle. He thought he saw him smile—as Tim dragged his sad head up and down like a child sucking his thumb, driving into sleep—but he couldn’t be sure.

  Tim stayed for dinner and wordlessly observed Max prepare banh chiao and some other Cambodian dishes for them, along with soup, mashed potatoes, and homemade applesauce and chocolate pudding.

  Nadine walked in the front door, and the sight of her enfeebled Max, the way beauty sometimes can. Her mortality, her impermanence, her life, occasionally saddened him so much he wanted to lie down. What’s the point if even she doesn’t last forever?

  Seeing Nadine and Tim in the same room reminded him of the car incident. How Tim stood in the background and watched his then ex-lover get batted around by Rodney.

  They sat among the plants and flowers around Rasheed’s bed. Max said to Tim, “You shouldn’t have let me get so much playing time,” as he passed Nadine the plate of spring rolls.

  “What are you talking about?” said Tim.

  “I probably cost us half of our games when I played for you. I mean, the others were so much better, Danny Danesh and company.”

  He didn’t mean it as a real reproach against Tim. He actually felt it a good conversation starter, maybe even a little funny. Shouldn’t they still aim to be a little funny? It made Nadine smile at least. But Tim stayed quiet, his forehead wrinkled. Then he mumbled that Danny Danesh was an idiot.

  Something about the way he said it made M
ax crack up. A drained, senseless laughter took hold of him for so long that his stomach muscles felt like they were ripping. Eventually it infected Nadine and Tim too, but not in the same way. Max was hysterical, repeating Danny Danesh’s name in a high-pitched pleading voice. He felt high for the first time in weeks. He stopped when he worried he’d choke.

  “No,” Tim said, “you’re right. You shouldn’t have been playing much at all, really.”

  Nadine said, “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, sometimes I told myself he’d surprise everyone this time, but mostly it was because I liked him. Or maybe I thought I was expressing my feelings for Rasheed publicly by having him play.”

  Rasheed hadn’t eaten. He’d been refusing food all day. Max suddenly felt provocative. “Tim. Why didn’t you do anything when Rodney was hitting him that day? Remember?”

  “Of course I remember. After Kelly moved in with you guys, we had a number of fights. In the end he told me not to, under any circumstances, come near you or him again. I guess I was teaching him a lesson by following his rules to a tee. The hardest thing was watching you go to pieces. You weren’t a boy who expressed himself much, hardly at all, really, and watching your face was the heart-wrenching part. As for Reed, I knew a couple of slaps wouldn’t be the end of the world for him. I needed something even more dramatic before I could come fighting for him, after all the cruel things we said to each other.”

  There were no other clues of Tim and Rasheed being lovers that Max could think of, other than Tim’s absence during the Kelly months. He was dumbstruck by how little he knew about the world he’d grown up in.

  “But you made up.” Max felt a pang of jealousy.

  “Yes, he came back to me. But sometimes I think he did so he could have someone to talk about you with. How much he loved you. Wouldn’t shut up about how proud he was and how you’d grown beyond him.”

  Tim’s effort to quell Max’s regret didn’t help. In fact, it was aggravating. Max wanted to ask if he knew that Rasheed lay here paralyzed because of his own son. Did Tim know that? Did he know what it was like to disable the man who raised you? Did he know what it was like to have ignored that man for the past four years? Not caring for him like he should have? Like he obviously should have. Did Tim have any idea? Did he know that Max would never sleep soundly again? And now this pain, this pain that Tim endeavored to relieve, was the strongest thread of attachment Max had to Rasheed. He hated when anyone tried to take that away from him. To sever them again. Nadine had told him he wasn’t responsible for what was happening, but he made it clear to her that he didn’t want to hear it. His culpability was necessary to him. It allowed him to be emotionally obsessed.

  Tim addressed Nadine. “You’re over here often.”

  She stared him down a beat. “I am I guess, yeah.”

  “Do you love him?” he asked.

  Max felt a fight instinct surge through his stomach, ready to defend his relationship with Nadine.

  But Tim wasn’t asking about Max and Nadine. “Do you love Reed?” he said.

  “I’m a doctor and a friend”—she put her hand on Max’s arm—“but I’ve never hoped for anything romantic with Reed, rest assured. Besides, I don’t think I’d have much of a chance even if those were my intentions.” Max hadn’t thought about how people on the outside interpreted Nadine’s living with them. Of course they thought she was in some deeper relationship with Rasheed. Not Max. Changing the subject, Nadine asked Tim, “Did Rasheed ever make up good stories for you like he did with Max?”

  “Constantly.”

  “About what?” she asked.

  “Everything from inventing fictions a hundred times more entertaining than they should be to sleeping around on me.”

  “No kidding,” Max said, again baffled by how much of Rasheed’s life eluded him.

  “But let me tell you one of my stories. A true story.”

  Nadine and Max followed Tim to the kitchen, and he started doing the dishes. “Five years ago, right after my dad died, I went and stayed with my mom in La Paz, Mexico, where they’d retired. She was in a bad way. I don’t know if you know, but people can actually die of loneliness. She didn’t want life without Dad. For her, being alive was a deal to be taken up as a couple. Long story short, her body quickly caught up with her mental state, and she started fading. In the middle of the night, about a half an hour before she gave out, I woke up with this funny feeling and rushed over to her room. I took her hand and saw she was dying. Like, right then. I was about to say good-bye, positive that she was ready. That this was all okay.

  “But then I hesitated, you know? What if now—in this moment when she couldn’t speak—she actually wanted to live? Wanted to be rescued and given another five, maybe ten happy years. Why couldn’t she learn to live happily alone? She could see what it was to exist without serving my father, like she had for the past fifty-some odd years. To live now could be her greatest chapter yet. I needed to call the ambulance to try and save her, but I didn’t know the number for emergency medical services in La Paz. The times we visited, it never came up.

  “I asked my mom but couldn’t make out what she was saying. I went looking for the phone book but couldn’t find it. I went to the used computer I’d brought them a few months earlier, in the study. I switched the thing on, and five whole minutes passed while I watched the thing light up and squawk to life. Then of course I had to connect to the Internet, which took forever in those days, making all sorts of strangled-cat sounds. Finally I was connected and found the number. I picked up the phone, put it to my ear, and then hung up. I realized that I might have just spent the last ten minutes of my mother’s life waiting for a computer to boot up in the room right next to hers. When I got to her, she was already dead.”

  Unmoved, Max said, “Why didn’t you just go to the neighbors?”

  “Yeah. Good question. Why didn’t I do a lot of things? But you know what? I don’t think her final fifteen minutes are more important than the rest of her life. We put so much emphasis on finales. It’s not only about a good ending; remember that. The good stuff can be behind us, and that’s got to be as good as if it were all saved up for the end.”

  “What’s your point?” Max said, again resenting that Tim was trying to make him feel better. He felt Nadine’s eyes on him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why did you tell us that story? What was the point?”

  Looking hurt, Tim said, “I’m on your side, Max.”

  Max somewhat aggressively took over the dishes, boxing Tim out with his body. “Fine. That’s fine. But why did you tell the story?”

  “Just to say that it’s okay. That this is going to be okay. You know?”

  “Yeah, I do know. And I know exactly what ‘It’s okay’ means. It means that nothing can be done. I don’t need anyone to ever tell me ‘It’s okay’ again.”

  Sitting with Rasheed on his bed the next evening, Nadine decided he was dehydrated and needed to get on an IV. She’d go to the hospital after dinner to get one. Max saw that she could feel it now too, in the quiet of Rasheed’s heartbeat, in his loss of appetite, in the arid wrinkles on his knuckles that looked like tiny screaming mouths. Something happens to a space when a person is falling apart in it; something obvious as the gray orb of seeds on a withered dandelion. A strong breeze away from blowing off.

  In the middle of the night, Max unfolded Nadine’s arms from him and crawled into his old bed with Rasheed. Nadine came to say good-bye to them in the morning, checking on the IV bag. Max didn’t get up to make her breakfast, telling her he needed to rest. She kissed the top of their heads and left for work.

  Max lay with Rasheed all day. Nadine brought home takeout that no one ate. It was a hunger strike against God or whoever made life this hard. Max had whispered to him, “If you don’t eat, I won’t either.” But Rasheed never opened his mouth. When Nadine insisted, he’d screw his eyes up tight. Finally, she threatened to drive him to the hospital. He made a plead
ing wheeze from his nose. Max sided with Rasheed, saying to leave him be. Nadine said that if by tomorrow he didn’t eat anything, she was taking him in. Max said he’d get him to eat. Alone with Rasheed, he tried again. It’s horrible to force food on someone. He could only be so insistent. He needed to either physically pry his father’s mouth open or give up. He quit when he heard the metal spoon clink against Rasheed’s front teeth a second time. Worst of all was the questioning cast on Rasheed’s face: Why are you doing this? Don’t you remember what I told you? Not to let this go on too long. You know what I want now.

  Max let the canaries out of their cages and flung food all over the floor for them to pick up as they pleased. The fight that burned inside him now was against the unimaginable confusion and suffering Rasheed endured. If he was to die soon—tomorrow or in fifty years—let it at least be fearless and painless. And give him back his faculties and senses. Let him say good night one last time, with a clear head and all his memories. Let him acknowledge how much he is loved and how much he has loved.

  At night Rasheed’s eyes snapped wide open. Two stunned bulbs gazing at the ceiling, waiting. He mustered up the strength to turn and look at Max, staring as alert and uncomprehending as a dying horse; a hyperawareness of every movement and color. Max wanted to inflict pain on himself.

  Max had gone two nights without the sleeping pills and two nights without any sleep. He tiptoed to the bathroom and brought the pills and a glass of water to the bedside table. He decided to take half of one in an hour, if he still hadn’t managed to fall asleep. After saying this to himself, he swallowed two pills.

  He dreamed of lying on his side in a black field, spooning Rasheed tightly, holding him together, keeping the life in a little longer. But the life poured out slowly and uniformly, as if from a watering can, until the final drop. A globe of blood appeared at the corner of Rasheed’s mouth. The blood grew black legs and spots, transforming itself into a ladybug. It crawled across his cheek and ear, and onto Max’s nose. The ocean seeped up from the black field and lifted the two bodies. They floated easily together, swaying back and forth on gentle waves like fragments of a boat. The ladybug had nowhere to fly and clung tightly to Max’s nose.