by Ismet Prcic
I sat there people-watching, the shoulder strap of my bag wrapped around my ankle in case somebody tried to steal my wrinkled clothes and smoked beef and the slivovitz I was smuggling as a present to my uncle—stuff he couldn’t get his hands on in California. After telling me to wait, Enes had led the rest of the Bosnians away to catch their flights to cities like Nashville, Fargo, St. Louis. I sat there thinking I was cold. My jaw was jumpy. But the more I pressed my arms against my body the more I became aware that it wasn’t the cold making my teeth chatter. I looked around. People: shapes, races, demeanors I’d never seen before. They were walking in groups or pairs, or were at ease with their aloneness, purposeful, while I sat there trying not to puke.
Other men with signs displaying the names of other sad countries rolled by with gaggles of confused immigrants, yelling in exotic languages, leaving behind one or two other petrified saps who, like me, tried to occupy as little space as possible. There was a gangly black man in a black suit sitting with four veiled women (resembling babushkas) in a range of sizes, pretending he knew what was up, but clearly scared. Only a young African woman in dark jeans and a white blouse, with closely cropped hair and shiny eyes, behaved with any sort of confidence. She took her seat, took a book and snack out of her carry-on, something noisy and, by the look of it, covered in salt, and proceeded to read and munch like she was on a park bench. I wanted to lay my head in her lap, to be touched and told that everything was fine.
Eventually, an airport shuttle—a smelly, back-loaded van of some kind—drove us through New York to where we were to spend the night. I caught only glimpses of the passing buildings, cityscapes, and cars; the African woman was next to me and our thighs were warmly touching. Feverishly, I imagined her taking my hand in hers, looking deep into my eyes and loving me wordlessly. I could see us hugging, touching, holding each other, walking along the beach, cuddling on a love seat, checking on our sleeping brown babies with their Slavic foreheads and African lips.
“Here we are,” the driver said.
The van pulled into the parking lot of a dingy motel and shat us out the back. The driver said to prepare our documents and follow him inside. I could tell he did this all the time, his body familiar with the asphalt beneath his feet. He knew to pull the front door instead of push it, though there was no sign. You could see that he hated but tolerated the manager, a shaggy man of Arab descent, who asked me: “How many in the room?”
“One, one,” I said showing him my index finger. He looked at my passport and had me sign next to my name on a faxed list. Then he shoved a key into my hand. The orange plastic rectangle to which it was attached read 7. He pointed, then turned to the African woman.
“How many in the room?”
I lingered, acting like I was having trouble picking up my bag, hoping to catch the number of her room, but the driver waved me over.
“Indian or Italian?”
“Bosnian,” I told him.
He rolled his eyes.
“To eat! Do you want Indian food or Italian food for dinner?”
I wanted to stomp on my own balls.
“Indian,” I said, figuring there was less of a chance of ending up with a plateful of pork.
“We’re leaving at six sharp. I will come and knock on your door. You should be up and ready,” he warned, jotting down my choice.
Rooms 1 through 14 were in the basement, and I followed the arrows through halls lit here and there with chipped sconces that shot murky light at the ceiling in repetitive, throbbing patterns. My room was in the corner, down the length of the corridor from a dazzling behemoth of a Pepsi machine. I unlocked the door and went in.
Room 7 was surprisingly big: a king-size bed with magenta sheets, a TV presiding, two nightstands with lamps, and a table with two chairs and a phone. It smelled of orangey bleach and dust, of cover-ups and FBI sting operations, sex for money and crimes of passion, alcoholic self-pity and junky visions—all the stuff I’d seen in American movies.
I tried to lock myself in but couldn’t turn the key. I tried in both directions and it wouldn’t budge. I opened the door, closed it, and tried again. Nothing.
I looked through the peephole and saw two teenage girls giggling by the Pepsi machine. One of them had a head scarf and looked European; I wondered if she was Bosnian. She covered her mouth when she laughed. The other one looked Arabic but was in a pair of ripped jeans, which exposed her scabby knees. Their faces glowed red and blue, in turn. I’d always been a loner and proud of it—people were something you had to deal with or avoid—but now, standing on a worn patch of beige carpet, on my first night in America, I longed for somebody, anybody.
Then I felt my stomach turn. Somewhere in all of this, the cheese puke I’d kept down had somehow turned to shit. I ran to the bathroom, and it came out of me in stormy gusts and thunderbolts. When I was done I felt rejuvenated, glorious.
Still, I didn’t want someone silently slipping in while I was asleep and cutting my throat or, even worse, knocking me out with a chloroform rag, turning me into a hustler rent boy or forcing me to work twenty-four hours a day in an underground meth lab. I didn’t want to wake up with missing kidneys, liver, heart, or eyeballs. I’m in America, I thought, and that meant I was in a movie; the fact that I couldn’t lock the door from the inside was one of those little details upon which terrible plot shifts would depend.
I was paranoid. I looked through the peephole again—nothing but red, white, and blue lights telling me that I was thirsty. The girls were gone. I opened the door and studied the lock in vain. I dragged over the table and jammed it under the knob. To get in, the crackhead nutter would have to push hard, which would make a noise, which would wake me up, which was my best chance of survival. Now I needed a weapon.
Someone knocked on the door and my heart kicked against my ribcage like an angry baby. I looked through the peephole: the driver.
I dragged away the table and opened the door.
“Indian?” he said, looking over his paper.
“Indian, yes.”
He handed me a couple of Styrofoam containers and put a check next to my name.
“Tomorrow morning at six,” he said, and made as if to go.
“Uhh . . . ,” I started, and he stopped.
“What?”
“My . . . my . . . my key,” I stuttered, “I . . . I can’t . . . uh . . . lock the door on the inside.”
He looked at me with obvious disdain.
“It’s automatic. You don’t have to do anything. You close the door and it’s locked.”
Before I ate, I jammed the table up against the door again, together with the chairs and all my luggage. Fuck the driver, I thought, he might be in on a plan.
The shower had no faucet, just a knob in the middle of the wall, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it get hot, if there was hot water in this place to begin with. The best I could do was not-icy, and I stepped in for a quick soap and rinse. By the time I was done—two minutes tops—my lips were the color of eggplant.
Channel 4 was news—fast, indecipherable English I found comforting in the absence of flesh-and-bone humans. I shivered under the covers. I heard the click, click, clicking of women’s shoes outside my window and snuck a peek through the magenta curtains, up through a grate below the street. I saw a woman’s legs and a big man in a mink coat holding both of her wrists and yelling at her. I’m fucking staying up all night, I told myself, but I woke at five thirty to the sound of the alarm, alive and unmolested, all organs intact.
* * *
The driver drove us to the airport. The African woman sat behind me this time, so I got to see some of the city. It was mostly New York motorists in profile, sipping from thermos bottles, yelling out of windows, smacking their dashboards, smoking, putting on makeup, singing, dozing off and waking up just in time to brake, playing air guitar, looking at me with what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at on their faces.
Enes met me at LaGuardia, showed me where I was to wait for my fl
ight to Los Angeles, shook my hand limply, and shoved off. I sat on another plastic chair and waited.
I kept thinking, You made it, man, not believing it. I looked at my hand, this thing I’d been living with all my life, and it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. It seemed only vaguely familiar, yet I was somehow in control of it; it was my hand to use. I glanced up to make sure that what I saw around me was America, confirmed that the seat next to me was a part of that country, then placed my strange hand on its cool plastic surface, and told myself again: You made it; you escaped.
Two other Prcis made this journey before me. There was my granduncle Bego, who fled the Nazi invasion via Paris, settled in an apartment in Flushing Meadows, and died there, alone. And then there was my uncle Irfan, who fled the Communists in 1969, ended up in California, and twenty-six years later invited me to live with him. We were all from the same town in Bosnia but had fled three completely different countries. Bego escaped the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Irfan, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. And me, the newly formed independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Says something about the Balkans: Regimes are plentiful, they don’t last long, and they make people want to run away.
What came to me then was the voice of my paternal grandmother. She had told me once that every time Bego or Irfan returned to Bosnia to visit, they had seemed to her like different people. Unrecognizable. She had blamed this on America.
I looked at my hand again.
Through the airport window, I could see a homeless man in a filthy camouflage jacket sitting on a curb, his back to me, playing fetch with a dog. He’d fight the plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper out of the Alsatian’s mouth, tease her with it, and then throw it down the sidewalk. She’d chase after it, her swollen teats swaying, bring it back to him, and the scene would repeat. I sat there mesmerized, telling myself again that I had made it, wishing I had a dog or something warm to touch, to look in the eye. It was then that the morning sun sliced through the clouds, its light hitting the window in such a way that suddenly I saw my reflection. I saw a young man sitting alone on a plastic chair, white-knuckled and wide-eyed and zit-faced, happy and perplexed, and I knew why my grandmother couldn’t recognize her own son, why I was wielding a stranger’s hand. I knew that someone new would get off this plastic chair and board a plane for Los Angeles and that all the while an eighteen-year-old Ismet would remain forever in the city under siege, in the midst of a war that would never end.
Just as it came, the sun went away. The homeless man threw the bottle. The bitch ran after it. I looked at my hand, then at everything else. I was new and America seemed too big a place to be alone in.
From the air Los Angeles was vast and gray and pockmarked with light blue pools. Down at LAX, it was hot for a winter afternoon; it was amusing. There were palm trees through the terminal window and people wore sandals in earnest.
Coming out of this one corridor I saw a man and a woman in their fifties, white, dressed in shiny red-white-and-blue frocks and top hats with stars all over them. They walked through the crowd, handing them things. The woman came up to me with an ear-to-ear smile.
“Hello, sir!”
“Hello.”
“Could I ask you a couple of questions?”
She was speaking slowly and clearly. I was glad about that.
“Yes.”
“Where are you from, sir?”
“Bosnia.”
“Are you visiting us for the first time?”
“I am refugee.”
“So you’re here for the government cheese.”
She said this very loudly, looking around and trying to get everyone’s attention.
“Well, sir, here you go,” she said and gave me a brick of yellow American cheddar. “Welcome to America!”
I noticed that there was a man with a camera taping me. I smiled and waved the cheese at him.
Isn’t this something, I thought. In New York they call you names and in Los Angeles a lady wearing the American flag gives you some cheese.
I knew then that I was going to like Los Angeles much better than New York.
Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary
from September 1998
Mother, oh, mati, I’m sorry; everything I write to you is a lie.
I’m not okay.
I don’t have enough money. Thousand Oaks is expensive. I eat once a day. I boil a quarter of a packet of spaghetti and pour Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup over it and use my roommate Eric’s salt and pepper, Eric’s dishes, Eric’s cutlery. Sometimes, when he’s not home, I take a sip of his Mountain Dew in the fridge or sneak a handful of his cereal into my mouth like a monkey. He’s a good man, don’t get me wrong. He shares stuff with me all the time, but it makes me feel bad when he does, makes me feel like a cliché, a poor Bosnia boy. But I have to accept. But I can’t. But I do. I accept every time. Sorry I’m not more like you.
I’m not healthy. I’m thinner than I was in Bosnia in wartime. There are twenty-one stairs from the courtyard to our first-floor apartment, and by the time I reach the front door I’m wheezing and flashes of light burst in the periphery of my vision. I fainted the other morning. I got up from my mattress and made it to the bathroom. I saw myself in the mirror, holding a toothbrush, and then I didn’t see myself anymore. I woke up on the floor with my abdomen all scraped up and raw. I’d scraped it on the sink as I fell.
I never call or go see Uncle Irfan, even though he lives five minutes away. I’d rather throw myself eyeball first into a cactus. Maybe one day I’ll tell you what living with him was like for two years. But I cannot stomach him any longer. He makes me physically ill. Daleko mu lijepa kua.
I’m not studying bookkeeping in college, but theater and writing. I’m sorry.
I started to write a memoir about my journey here. You wanted to be an actress and a poet but ended up a nurse and miserable. I’m not gonna do that. I only wish you could read the first chapter about my arrival and tell me how to continue, tell me if it’s any good.
I don’t sleep well. I almost don’t sleep at all. I dream of going to my college and mowing people down with a Kalashnikov. I dream of throwing hand grenades out of my car window. I dream of being shot.
I couldn’t go to a real doctor, because here you have to be insured or pay up the nose, so I went to this Dr. Cyrus guy who volunteers on campus and he prescribed some sedatives, which I eat like M&M’s.
He says I have post-traumatic stress disorder. He says that the pills are only a short-term solution and that in order to really get better I need to put my experience in a larger framework to help me make sense out of the whole thing.
He’s the one who gave me the idea to write a memoir. I asked him what I should write for this therapy to work and he said, Write everything. I asked where I should start and he said, Start at the beginning.
At first it worked; I wrote about my escape, about my childhood, trying to keep to the facts. But as I kept at it, things—little fictions— started to sneak in. I agonized over them, tried to eradicate them from the manuscript, but it made the narrative somehow less true. When I put them back in, it became truer but it didn’t exactly fit what I remembered, not in every little detail.
When I opened up to Dr. Cyrus he laughed, said that what I was experiencing was normal, that our brains are peculiar computers that constantly augment and even edit true events out of our memory when those events do not fit into the narrative that we tell to ourselves every day, the narrative of our own lives.
We’re all heroes of our bullshit is how he put it. Don’t worry about what is true and what is not, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Just you write. Write everything.
(. . . suicide attempt
number one. . .)
Mustafa never wanted to be born.
His mother, she wanted him out and he didn’t want to go. So he finagled the umbilical cord around his neck and big toe, hoping to choke himself to death. But the space was wanting and he was alread
y ten pounds with a head like half a loaf of bread and he didn’t really know what he was doing. He kicked and wiggled, more out of frustration than anything else.
She misdiagnosed his tantrums for eagerness to emerge. His father took her to the hospital, but the doctors and nurses were celebrating the eighth of March, International Women’s Day. They were all tipsy and loud, greasy around their mouths from all the syndicate food. They made his mother wait until the next day. Although this was working out to his advantage (more time to really do himself in), he could still detect the errors of their ways, and had he been able to talk he would have characterized the Yugoslav Health System as cruelly negligent.
He kicked and kicked and blacked out and that’s when they used his sudden motionlessness to pull him into life. There was much rejoicing, everywhere but in his head.
(. . . some early sorrows . . .)
EARLIEST MEMORY
Hot summer day. My grandmother brought a hatchet from the shed and hung it on the branch of a thin cherry tree in the backyard, smiling. I sat on a sheepskin rug in the shade of a rosebush watching a hen trying to flee, flapping its white wings, one of its yellow talons tied by rope to a stake driven into the middle of the lawn. It would get a meter or so into the air and then, anchored, flap back down. For a second it would stand there balancing on one foot, blinking, cocking its head sideways, and then it would try again.
When grandmother approached, it went crazy, flying around in a whirlpool of airborne feathers. The sound of the wings was deep and muffled like glove-handed applause. Grandmother sniggered as she stepped on the rope closer and closer to the hen, gradually reducing its fly zone. Finally she caught it, untied the rope, and with the wide-eyed hen under her left arm, took the hatchet off the cherry branch, and walked behind the shed.
I got up and waddled after her, but she heard me and yelled at me not to look. I stood around the shed’s corner for some time not moving, then peeked out anyway. I saw her kneel down on the bird, trying to subdue its wings, trying to get a good grip on it so she could place its head on a low stump in the clearing full of sawdust and wood chips. Her back was to me, so she couldn’t see me.