by Chris Dennis
“No, I was only saying they are special.”
It was a grainy black-and-white recording. At the first sharp quivering of a clarinet, his father screamed, “Oh! It is Esma Redžepova singing ‘Chaje Shukarije’!” He patted Tamer on the knee as they sat on the couch in front of the television, the light washing out his father’s lean face. There was the long exhalation of an accordion, and a woman singing in a high, birdlike vibrato. Tamer’s father sat still on the edge of the couch, mouthing every word, wiping his tears with the corner of his apron. In this moment Tamer felt his father was not his father but a stranger. The men on the videotape formed a circle around Esma Redžepova, swaying back and forth while playing their instruments, tilting in close to sing backup on the chorus. Tamer ate the cookies, which were crisp and rich, like sugared nuts, while his father stared dreamily. “What a stylish dance! This is a whole galaxy!” his father said. Esma Redžepova, with her many necklaces and round, serious face, was the first woman Tamer had ever looked upon and felt a kind of desire—a yearning to hold and examine entirely.
A dim cluster. A stolen library book. The slow excavation of a beginning. What is a memory? A sand-filled crater on the surface of one’s most solid self? Decades later, Tamer would feel, each time he recalled something, the small, sad changes being made—like a hand disturbing a compact cavity of sand as he searched for the bottom.
By the time he was sixteen, stocky and disheveled, acne budding along his jaw, his hair unclean and long enough to hide behind, the once prolonged M and those manic repetitions at the start of words had been rubbed from his voice, leaving mostly silence in their place. He was just back from the neighbor’s house and throwing his sneakers toward the sofa. He was holding a paper sack full of old Hustler magazines that the neighbor boy had sold him for four dollars. In the kitchen the rug was unraveling, gathering around the legs of the table and the metal chairs, running under the refrigerator. His father was laying down, wearing his apron and a purple Nike T-shirt, staring up at the ceiling fan. The video of Esma Redžepova played on the television in the living room. There was the usual furious pumping of the accordion, the shocking timbre of Esma’s voice, and inside the music, a ringing, until he moved closer to the kitchen, so that all the colors of the room shifted and it was not the rug, but something soaking through his father’s shirt and apron, spreading out like thick, dirty water across the linoleum. He went into the room. The floor was smeared with blood. He got down with a dish towel and pressed it against his father’s chest. The blood soaked through. He grabbed all of the dish towels. He yelled, “Wake up right now, motherfucker!” He heard his voice in the room and it was not like his own voice but instead like his father’s when he yelled at the neighbor’s dog. It was a cheap sound. It was the heaviest thing. His father had already stopped breathing. Tamer thought his own throat was going to close shut too. He didn’t want to leave the room to call the ambulance, but he made himself go to the phone. He pressed the towels one at a time until he found the exact place where the blood came from. It was a small hole. He could put a finger over it and make it disappear. He tore the flimsiest towels apart and tied a single long bandage around his father’s chest. He sat there, holding the sticky towels in place, attempting a chaotic CPR until the paramedics came through the door and pulled him aside.
The suspects left tracks from the door to Selden Avenue, one block south. They took his father’s shoes and pitched the gun, like litter, into a nearby drainage ditch.
“Why would they take his shoes?” Philip cried, hours later, after they’d left the police station. He pulled his car onto the shoulder of the Southfield Freeway, pounding his fists against the steering wheel. He couldn’t stop crying. “Who are the police?” he asked Tamer. “Who am I? I am somebody. Who are they?” He was screaming it. “You can stay with me, Tamer!” Philip’s face was bloated, as if injected with something, all of his features seized in fear.
Tamer stayed at Philip’s house in Dearborn Heights. He lay on the couch, staring at the TV, eating mixing bowls full of cereal, hiding in the bathroom, watching reruns of Family Matters or Step by Step or ER. There was no funeral service. There wasn’t enough money for one. Or else Philip couldn’t pull himself together long enough to arrange it. Late at night, hours after Philip had drugged himself with sleeping pills, Tamer would jolt from a half-sleep, feeling as if he were being hauled viciously out of his own body—pulled into a black hallway, tugged under dark waters, dragged through a bottomless hole in the floor. Soon there was a wooden box on Philip’s bedside table. Philip said, “What are we going to do?” But Tamer could only shrug and stare at the TV. A med student stepped away from a body. Dr. Doug Ross hovered with a scalpel. “Stop!” the visiting attendant said. “This lady is suffering from pulmonary edema!” Tamer would stand in Philip’s room and stare at the wooden box until he thought Philip might come in, then he’d go back to the couch. Early in the mornings Tamer could hear Philip in the sunroom, his spoon clanking against a cup as Philip sobbed in the high, ugly tone of a teenage girl. Sometimes, Tamer could tell, Philip tried to hold it in his chest until it sounded like he was gagging. “Ejder, Ejder,” he said. It was surprising to hear. It was as if Tamer’s father didn’t have a name until now, until Philip said it. Tamer could not bring himself to get up from the couch to go and comfort Philip. It didn’t seem appropriate.
“I don’t see any reason why you can’t stay as long as you want and we’ll see about getting your father’s Oldsmobile over here so you’ll have something to get around in. I know you’ll want his car, unless you don’t?” Tamer was sitting on the back porch, thinking he’d drive the awful car, and he could stay with Philip. He decided Philip was the only other person who loved his father and maybe he wouldn’t mind being here with him. No one from Afyon called or wrote or came, though who, other than Tamer, could’ve told them what had happened? Philip and Tamer drove to the house on a Saturday and Tamer filled some boxes with all the things he wanted to take. He didn’t look in the kitchen. The body was somewhere else. The body was suspended in time. The kitchen was clean as a tooth. They left the house and locked the doors and Philip gave Tamer the keys, dropped them into his palm on the porch. They planned on coming back in a week for his father’s car, but instead the police came to Philip’s house, with a social worker, saying Tamer had to appear in court. Philip had it all wrong, he said to Tamer, he wasn’t thinking.
They took Tamer in the back of the police car to a children’s home where he slept on a cot at the foot of another bed. The next day he sat with a judge in a cramped office while the social worker read aloud from a folder of papers. Afterward, alone together in the men’s room, Philip asked Tamer whether he understood what was happening. Tamer said he did not.
“I don’t think I do either. I’ve been too upset. You’ll be eighteen soon, though,” he said, “and we can sort it all out.”
“That’s more than a year from now,” Tamer said.
Philip washed his hands at the sink and dried them. He stared at his shoes. He said, “I wonder if someone is wearing the shoes? Do you think someone’s wearing them?”
“How would I know?” Tamer said, the heat draining from his body all at once. He turned away from Philip’s lifeless face in the mirror and headed toward the door.
Philip drove Tamer to the foster family’s house but wouldn’t get out of the car. Tamer walked to the steps to meet the social worker, who smiled while handing him her card and a piece of candy. “Their names are Patsy and Darryl,” she said, “and their daughter’s name is Cecelia.” Tamer didn’t turn around when Philip drove off. Instead he stared at the obnoxious wreath hanging on the front door, trying not to drop the heavy box he was holding.
They wanted to shake his hand. They wanted to take him out in the backyard to show him the basketball hoop. His room had a single bed and a large metal desk. They emptied the closet so he could put his things inside.
During the first days he ate hi
s meals at the desk. The Buckleys used paper plates. They used plastic forks and plastic cups. It was hard being in the house. He felt paralyzed by the pressure to speak. In the afternoons, when the house was still empty, he went into the living room to watch television. He would come out of his room at night to sit on the couch and watch ER. Cecelia said ER was boring but Patsy called it “a high-octane drama!” “We love it, don’t we Tamer?”
Pasty was loud and looked, always, as if she’d just returned from vacation. Her skin was flushed and bronzed, and her clothes seemed suited for someone much younger.
Twice he put on the videotape of Esma Redžepova. He mouthed some of the words. He looked at the black-and-white footage and wondered how she must look—aged, or different now, not the slight, agile woman on the videotape.
Tamer called Philip once a week, just for the chance to speak without having to dislodge every word like a seed from a straw. “Are they treating you nice?” Philip asked. “Do you talk?” Tamer didn’t respond, which, of course, was his answer. When he closed his eyes he felt that every new movement he made left a blur, every new instance of stillness a bright orb. It was as if he were tracking himself, like a satellite.
In the courthouse the judge had asked Philip, “What is your relationship to the father? You were friends?”
“We were friends,” Philip said.
But it didn’t feel like the truth to Tamer. What else could he have said? It was like he was being interviewed for a job he didn’t want. He touched his face too many times, ran his fingers inside the cuff of his pant leg and repeated the questions back as if they were impossible to answer.
Darryl Buckley owned a butcher’s shop and said to Tamer, “If you want some extra spending money you could come and work after school or on the weekends.”
Darryl and his wife stared at each other from across the dinner table. Patsy looked at Tamer but spoke to Darryl, saying, “Tell him what time to come to work.”
“After school, Patsy. I already said that.”
“He did,” said Tamer.
Cecelia fished a bone from her mouth, laid it on the edge of her paper plate. “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s a bone.” Her hair was careful and made her look like an adult. She wore ugly clothes too. “Business casual,” she called it. Patsy and Cecelia both had large, glassy eyes like cartoon forest animals and together consumed many packages of chocolate almonds.
“I’m glad you’re eating with the family, Tamer,” Cecelia said. It sounded as if she had rehearsed it.
Tamer longed for a moment like the one on the video, where the camera panned to capture an overhead view of all the musicians in their huddle, their heads nearly touching as if they were spokes attached to some hidden axis, their large gauzy shirts brushing against each other as they rose up and leaned back to reveal Esma Redžepova. She lifted her arms above her head, twirled her wrists and splayed her fingers. She turned to look at the camera while the men swayed and circled her, like many moons moving into alignment. “Hello, Esma. Hello, many moons,” Tamer said to himself in the living room, unsettled by the sound of his own voice. The whole scene, with its perfect choreography, made him even more desperate for his father, for the now-lost moments in his life when every action was carried out with grace and inherent rhythm.
He was sitting alone with Patsy in the kitchen in his new basketball shorts when she reached over to put a hand on his leg, running her finger up his thigh. “You’re a beautiful man, Tamer. I bet your father was a beautiful man. Are all Turkish men so handsome? You want to help me bread the fish?”
“No,” he said, getting up from the table and walking out into the yard. He stood behind the garage, watching bees swarm an empty soda can.
In the butcher shop he stocked the shelves and ran the register until Darryl came in one afternoon with a set of knives he’d bought especially for Tamer. “I appreciate them,” Tamer managed to say. There was a chart in the back room showing the animals and all their parts. Tamer stared gravely at it when there was nothing else to do. He would arrange and rearrange the animal parts on the cutting table. He made the cuts along the meat, and each time the effort of his hand holding the knife seemed to lessen, or soften, so that eventually it felt as if every animal were designed to be disassembled. Darryl fried pork skins in the deep fryer and complained about the customers. Other times he hid in the office doing crossword puzzles. At the end of every week he paid Tamer his hourly wage and occasionally a little more. “To save,” he said, leaving Tamer to close up alone.
Eventually he made Tamer shoot a cow. They drove to a meat locker in Hamtramck. Tamer watched as a man in rubber coveralls put a gun against a cow’s head. The man gave the gun to Tamer and explained how to use it. He took Tamer’s hand in his own and pressed the barrel to the hair between the cow’s gelatinous eyes. Tamer pulled the trigger. The handgun made a quick, dull pop and after the slaughter Darryl explained how to dig the bullet from the brain. Tamer pushed a finger into the tepid smoothness, excavating a tiny shell.
He felt dislodged.
Cecelia found a dead cat on the carport and asked Tamer if he would help her bury it. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said, her hand perched insincerely on her hip. He couldn’t help but wonder, too often now, what Cecelia looked like without her clothes on. The girls in his class were quiet or else they shrieked manically at one another from across the lunch table. While Cecelia was looking for a shovel Tamer put his mouth up to the cat’s and blew.
“Disgusting!” she said, coming around the corner of the garage. “You’re crazy! You’re going to catch a feline disease.” He looked at her in her elaborate sweater, a dire expression on her face. He looked back down at the cat. It lay there stiff as a doll. Wouldn’t it be something, he thought, if the cat began to squirm?
After dark he went into the yard again. He’d been lying in bed just thinking about the cat. He was still in his underwear, and he knelt down beside the small grave. He brushed the dirt away. Move a leg, move anything, he thought. It felt as if so much time had passed—he was so different, he thought, each day. How long, he wondered, would that feeling last? It was as if time were passing too quickly and also not at all.
As he was falling back asleep his father came and stood at the foot of the bed. He opened his satin robe and showed Tamer his chest. His lungs looked waxy and crooked inside the open, raw cavity. His father slowly turned his head toward the bedroom door, then even slower back to Tamer. It was as if he was trying to say something. He had a guilty, exhausted expression. Finally, in a voice that wasn’t familiar, his father said, “That was a nice thing to do, for the girl, Tamer.”
“Thank you,” Tamer whispered back.
Tamer had sex with Patsy Buckley on the Fourth of July while Darryl and Cecelia were at the levee watching fireworks. She asked him again, “Are all Turkish men like this?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You’re a virgin?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t give a shit,” she told him. “I deserve this. You deserve this. Look at me while you’re inside me so I can see your beautiful face.”
They were in the garage, in the backseat of the car. What he wanted to do, but was afraid to, was lower himself down to where he entered her, to examine the secret shapes of her body, to see how it all worked. But the whole situation felt involuntary and embarrassing, so he kept his eyes closed and allowed her to do most of the work.
He understood that his mother had left them all those years ago because she was living with a man who didn’t need her, a man who couldn’t help but stare at other men while waiting in line at the grocery store, the filling station, the park. His father loved to cut the sandwiches into triangles and wipe the bathroom mirror and steam the cushions on the couch—he adored steaming the cushions. Tamer wondered if all mothers were like Patsy Buckley, hiding out in their garages at night wit
h their rum and cokes, reading ragged copies of The Thorn Birds or Kaleidoscope until their husbands fell asleep watching television in bed.
Tamer lived with the Buckleys for a year and three months. He moved out two weeks after his eighteenth birthday. They had a party for him in the backyard. The smell of charcoal clung to their clothes, the icing slipped off the cake. Patsy spilled a daiquiri down the front of her sundress and sat with it dripping between her breasts. She insisted they sing “You Are My Sunshine” instead of “Happy Birthday.” He quit working at Darryl’s shop and used the money he’d saved to rent an apartment in Southfield. He got a job at Leonard’s Meat Processing on Nine Mile Road and for the first time ever he was alone.
There’s a rainbow sheen in certain cuts of meat. Tear it from the bone, hold it up to the window. Sometimes when light hits a side of beef it splits into colors. At Leonard’s there was a system of tracks along the ceiling of the locker so that the cows and pigs could be rotated and spun, like clothes on a rack. He could tear down a full-grown hog in less than an hour. He’d slide a bucket under the hog where it hung from the ceiling like a colossal coat. The blood spun down. The organs plopped. Hardly anyone talked to him. The hog bled what little blood it had left and the bucket filled to the lip or overflowed onto the floor.
Tamer would not have said he was lonely, but he pulled a milk crate up to his living room window after dark so that anyone on the street could see him sitting by himself. Outside Detroit hummed like a hundred faraway motorboats. He shaved his face and washed his body at the kitchen sink. He looked at the skyline on his walk to work in the mornings, watched the sunlight spread like a spill, watched the city soak it up like a rag.
Philip came by, eventually, with an old reclining chair. In Tamer’s new apartment he emptied a bag of curtains onto the floor, insisting they should hang them up. “Everyone can see in,” he said. He stood on the cushion of the unsteady chair and clipped the hooks over the rod. “My God,” he said, “you’re so high up.” Tamer brought two beers from the refrigerator and they drank them on the living room floor. “You shouldn’t have these,” Philip said, appearing uneasy and out of reach.