The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  We cut through a canyon of stone, followed shortly by an orchard of palm trees. I leaned into the metal rail as the train ascended and descended and saw fit to take me, the wheels below making a steady grinding sound that vibrated up through the floor. I gripped tight and looked out toward the horizon where two men suddenly appeared shepherding some twenty goats. Surprised—for I had no idea where they came from nor where they were headed—I watched until the train angled around yet another curve in the track, passing through morning shadows that stretched out elliptically and changed my view altogether.

  I crushed my cigarette against the rail, and gauging the speed of the train, wondered if it was possible to lower myself over the side and land safely on the ground without too much damage. The idea of being completely lost this way, so many thousands of miles from home and just one thin metal barrier removed from being utterly abandoned, appealed to me briefly, though in the end I came to my senses and chose to stay on board. My decision caused me to think back to last night and how the man with the fever insisted, “I have no choice,” when asked about his own course of travel. The claim seemed so preposterous at first, given how easily the man might have otherwise resisted boarding the train, that I couldn’t bring myself to show compassion. What troubled me most was the way it seemed that, if a person had no choice, they had no reason to feel tortured by what they were doing. A person became fevered, melancholy and remorseful not because of circumstances beyond their control but when choices made—or not made—turned out to be in error. This was why I regret what happened with Liz, because I sensed I didn’t choose to behave the way I wanted.

  And yet, standing there I couldn’t help but wonder what if, in some crude way, the man was right? What if there were times we had no choice and what did this say then about my recent blunders? Perhaps I had no choice but to play Roslavets as I did, and as such mangle my affair with Liz. I thought about this for a while, and feeling no better from the possibility of such complete surrender, stared further out in the desert where I spotted three dunes rolling end to end, their curves in an erotic sort of undulation. I pictured Elizabeth laid out in the sands, propped up on her hip and shoulder, imagined her asleep in Spain, in her hotel room, naked atop the smooth white sheets while first the moon and then the sun glowed over her. I watched her sleep, anticipated her every breath and slightest movement until all at once I remembered Niles dozing in our compartment and dashed inside.

  The train chose that moment to pitch left and I lost my balance in the aisle, falling against the arm of a snoozing man who woke up cursing. I ran on, already envisioning Niles with the point of a pen jabbed into his neck and the blood everywhere mocking me for being so careless. Terrified, I tossed open the door, relieved to find Niles sitting with his camera filming the desert through the window. “Fuck,” I panted. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Niles switched his camera off and put it back in its case, the light from the early morning sky white and gleaming. “It’s OK,” he said. “I’m fine.” The train ran on. I sank down in my seat. We were now a half mile up the track from where I first rushed inside, the dunes that reminded me of Elizabeth out of view. Niles reached for the bag with our meat sandwiches, and offering me half, repeated a bit too enthusiastically, “I’m great, really.”

  Eight hours later we arrived in Algiers. The main railway station was located at the port near the Gare Martime. At mid-afternoon the buildings seemed a fortress set against the dark green water of the bay. On one side, by the El Djazair islets and the Hot de la Marine, was a lighthouse, the glow from its beacon extinguished, the road leading away from the marina dividing the old Turkish harbor and the Darse de l’Amiraute where, despite the poverty of the region, a handful of lavish yachts were moored to the docks. Niles reserved a room at the Sahel on the Rue Drouillet, and we took a cab across the Admiralty Causeway into the heart of the city, where the streets were crowded with pedestrians and small Italian- and Spanish-made cars. (In contrast to the urban tangle, a few miles farther south at Ouargla and Touchourt people still lived as their ancestors did a thousand years before, in goat-hair tents, nomadic in their movement, shifting as easily as sand.) The desk clerk at the Sahel was indifferent to our arrival, the tourist trade in Algiers having declined so far in recent years the city no longer felt a need to cater to travelers.

  Niles paid for three nights stay in advance. (As the one most determined to travel, and as his resources far exceeded mine, Niles most generously offered to cover all expenses of our trip in total.) Our room was moderately sized, with two beds, a wooden chair covered by a flat blue cushion, a tall beige dresser whose open drawers emitted a scent of cedar. A large fan turned overhead, doing little to cool the air. A fly soared several times from wall to wall before landing upside down on the ceiling. The bathroom had a half-sized tub, emerald green tiles, and polished silver piping. After we showered and washed the sand and sweat from our trip down the drain, we went to a small restaurant a few blocks from the hotel where we sat outside and had dinner.

  Naive to the customs, I asked for whiskey then settled for juice. Niles was quiet, his coloring off and eyes narrowed as if pinching back an ache. He spoke only to answer questions I put to him about his plans to take his camera and explore the city in the morning, and later as he asked about my strategy for finding Timbal. I had no idea really, had thought of contacting the American consulate and local wire service, had the name of a café Timbal allegedly liked to frequent—the information provided from an article now two years old—but other than that I’d not given the matter any thought.

  We finished our meal and before returning to the Sahel wandered across the boulevards, past apartments and darkened shops, grey and white high-rises and squat adobe houses, handsome mosques columned with horseshoe arches and crowning minarets jutting up toward heaven. It was almost midnight by the time we went back to our room and dropped into bed exhausted, a rope attached between our ankles, the overhead fan gyrating like a slowly falling star. “So here we are then,” I said to Niles, hoping he’d answer and provide additional insight into what we were really doing and could expect tomorrow. In the dark, Niles was too tired to say anything however, and after a few minutes I closed my eyes. I lay very still, focusing on images where Liz sat with me at a long table shared by my father, brother, and mother, and despite the confusion that came from these half dreams, I soon managed to relax and drift off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE ROAD TAKEN

  Between his hands, in the glare as he continued to stand at the window on the thirty-fourth floor of the Ryse & Fawl Building, squinting through the sun toward shadows created by the Reedum & Wepe, Franklin Finne sees a blue Ford Escort slide up to the curb and a man in a long coat tug a heavy case from the back just before the car drives off. Shortly after this, a young woman in faded jeans and orange sweater comes from the metro and also goes inside. Then the blue car returns, almost crashing against the curb as it rolls to a stop and another man gets out from the driver’s side this time, Franklin watching confused as the figure appears as a haunting.

  Returning to Renton, Tyler shared an apartment with Oz on the east side of the city. (“Just until we have some money,” they both agreed.) The move from Hamburg went without incident, though finding work in the States proved more difficult than expected. Local 457 of the electrician’s union wanted $300 up front on top of dues then said, “Two months wait, so long as you’re paid up each month and someone pulls your name.” Tyler was charged $ 150 to take a test to prove his knowledge, then told—despite his high score—his best bet was to join the local for general labor and see if that didn’t get things started. (It didn’t.) He put in applications all around town, at handyman services, heating and cooling specialists, with contractors and subcontractors who consistently turned him down. “Tough times,” he was informed, patted on the back and sent away.

  Frustrated, he decided to finish his degree, convinced this would help, only trying to transfer cred
its from HTU to the University of Renton meant dealing with bureaucratic fuckups and resistance on the part of Admissions to accept his transcript. (A smug provost suggested credits toward an electrical engineering degree from a German institution were of no value in the States as, “America runs on an altogether different current.”) Further complications arose as the V.A. was slow to authorize money from the GI Bill Tyler had coming, waiting they said on forms from Hamburg, on paperwork and additional information lost somewhere in the system. In time they stopped answering his letters and refused to return his calls.

  “Some homecoming,” Osmah goaded. “Your country is quick to stick its nose into the affairs of others, yet what does it do for its own? Where is your country now, Sergeant Finne, to share its wealth and abundance?”

  Tyler said nothing. He did not have a ready argument, was thinking the same himself—“All my years in the army and what is this shit?”—though he kept quiet and continued to search the papers for potential positions, paid his dues at the union but was quickly running out of cash and rarely called for a job. Two months went by, and then another, and with his prospects no better and his money situation worse, he decided Oz was right. Relying on a system that never cared a rat’s ass about people like him was foolish, all hope and promise propaganda, and resorting to a different strategy he caught a bus across town.

  “Sure, I got something for you,” Turk said, his wisp of a moustache no different than ten years before, his narrow face aged not disagreeably though he looked still much like a harvest mouse. “Two hundred dollars and it’ll take you ten minutes. For you, Ту, it’ll be no sweat.”

  And so it was he went back to work.

  Oz spent a great deal of time with Ziad Shehhi, prayed daily at a mosque on the west end of town, spoke vaguely to Tyler about opening an office for the Band of Forbearance while paying his share of the rent and other expenses in cash. He told Tyler he found a job doing research for one of the professors at the university and was in line for a teaching fellowship in the fall, and when Tyler assumed such a job would lead Oz to think differently about the States, he was met with derision. “You are wrong. They hire me to teach because I am good and they can get me cheap. It is exploitation, nothing less.” What Osmah Said Almend saw of America—what he spoke of constantly and refused to be dissuaded—was a country of excess, as backward in its spirit as a camel trying to drink water through its ass. “Such arrogance is mind-numbing. Yours is a culture driven by consumption. The effects of worshiping capitalism—which Americans confuse for democracy—is everywhere,” Oz said. “The rich here are all like spoiled children while the lowest worker is no better, aspiring for nothing more than a larger paycheck so he might acquire goods he doesn’t need and still can’t afford.

  “And the women—Sweet Allah!—worse than the Germans by far. Here they’re without shame,” Oz insisted. “Salesclerks in whores’ dresses, acting as if they’re doing you a favor when you come into their shop, looking you square in the eye, and sizing you up like a fish in the market.” One in particular, an American-born Moroccan girl named Isha had gotten Oz’s attention. Isha worked as a seamstress in a tailor shop where Oz took a pair of slacks to be repaired. She had bright red streaks dyed to the ends of her otherwise jet black hair, wore a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with a leather necklace dangling in front, her skin a cool caramel brown while her long fingernails curved and were dotted with fake jewels. She examined the area Oz needed mending—a separation in the crotch due to poor stitching and a suspect sort of thread—and chewing her gum far back on her molars, Isha joked, “You must be carrying some extra weight down here.”

  Osmah blushed, the reaction a puzzle for he would have expected himself to respond with anger toward such audacity. “It is,” he heard himself quip instead, “a cross I bear.”

  The next afternoon, when picking up his slacks, he dropped off a shirt with the underside of the right sleeve pulled almost completely from the seam. (“An accident,” was how Oz explained.) He returned the following day, pleased by the smile Isha extended as he approached the counter, and when she asked if he liked reggae—he wasn’t sure—and would he like to go to a club later that night and check out the scene, he agreed at once then hurried off to pray.

  The music was loud with large drums and electric instruments and a singer who made it altogether impossible to understand the words, but Oz, who didn’t know how to dance and was startled by these American women convulsing among a crowd like snakes shimmying in the heat, found himself jumping into the center of Isha’s motion as she swayed about with sinewy arms above her head. Back at her apartment, with a different sort of music playing on the stereo, Isha stripped and mounted Oz on the living room floor, continuing her dance until his body groaned and shivered in its own release.

  All the next day, in his meetings with Ziad Shehhi and at prayer, he was distracted by thoughts of Isha, confused and wondering now that he had a woman how his priorities might change. These thoughts were new, terrifying and exciting, and continued on until that evening when he went to Isha’s apartment and sought to embrace her the moment she opened the door.

  “Ozzie, Ozzie,” she held him off with arms extended, the snakelike fluidity of her limbs from yesterday turning hard now and pushing him back. “Hold on there, Tiger. What are you doing here?” The red tips of her hair flashed across the center of her face like candle flames. Osmah stood bewildered, wondering at first if she might not simply be teasing, and realizing at last she wasn’t, managing to stammer, “But last night? Isha, dear?”

  She could only laugh, half with pity, as she continued to block the entrance to her apartment. “Last night was fun,” she sounded bored. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

  “But?”

  “What?”

  “We?”

  “That? Jeez. Come on now, Oz. Really, I’m busy. I have a date.”

  “But, but?”

  “You were wonderful, Ozzie,” she tried to say what she thought might work, then grew annoyed as Osmah insisted on arguing with her. (What was it with these foreign men who moved to America yet refused to accept the liberties of their new culture?) “You didn’t really think that was anything?” she laughed again, more cruelly this time. “I mean, what? We didn’t have that much fun. And your dancing. And your weenie. For a change of pace I suppose it was fine, but really, I have to go.”

  In midnight prayer Osmah wept for the generosity of Allah to have bestowed on him a test, and beat his face with fisted hands for having failed his master so. The mistake, he swore, would not happen again. The mistake only proved that America was a land never to be trusted.

  In February, Tyler took a job as a bouncer in a club where Turk controlled the sale of drugs: opiates and Ecstasy, coke and heroin and weed. (“You’re in charge,” Turk said. “You keep things running and no one sells but people working for me, understand?”) He quit the union, stopped sending letters to the V.A. and phoning the university, while Oz scoffed at Tyler’s new career. “Your own country has made you a criminal,” he mocked Tyler’s enterprise and wanted to know, “What sort of people so mistreat their own? On every corner, in every face I see blasphemy. You are a mongrel nation that looks upon my country with condescension and greed, and yet you are all infidels! A man would be providing a great service to the world if he could rattle America’s confidence and let everyone know its foundation is false.”

  The rantings Oz subjected him to grew more wrathful and extreme, talk of anarchy and rebellion, and only the cash in Tyler’s pocket allowed him to ignore Oz’s howl. If he otherwise felt himself living on the precipice, he denied his concern until late March, when the club was raided and finding himself arrested, he called Turk to bail him out. The response he received was not like years’ past however, Turk more cautious now and protective of self-interest, and instead of help he was met with “Who’s this? Ту Finne? I don’t know you. You can’t be calling me here.” Eventually, he got word to Oz who came with the nесessary cas
h. “You see?” Oz railed the whole ride home. “Not even your American criminal friends can be trusted. Even honor among thieves is a foreign concept in your homeland.”

  “Fuck!” and “Fuck!” and “Fuck!” again. Tyler in his rage sounded much like his father wagging an enormous fist at the heavens while cursing forces he couldn’t defeat. “What a crock of shit!” Every direction he turned another dead end. When Oz approached him then with an offer of several thousand dollars’ profit to help secure a list of special materials, when he said, “Here is opportunity, the only good chance coming your way in America,” when he spoke not in terms of anarchy, nihilism, and rebellion but more cleverly of profit and progress and personal gain, Tyler saw no reason to turn his back. “Write ‘em down,” he avoided asking questions, said simply, “I can get whatever you need.”

  Occupied in this way, it took less than three weeks to obtain all the supplies Oz asked for, and when Oz told him what he had planned, Tyler said, “You got me confused with someone who gives a damn.” Sufficiently paid, he refused to concern himself with larger issues, and not until the night before did he admit to himself the misgivings he had. His clothes, along with the rest of his few possessions, were packed in an army-issued duffle, all his money converted to cash and a map marked to get him out west. (As part of their deal, Oz provided additional money to buy a used car.) The drive across town took twenty minutes, and once he had dropped Oz at the curb Tyler sped off.