Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (11 page)

His father was tapping on the window, saying, “Hello? Excuse me, wait a minute— What’s it— Hello?”

Nadine pushed through and said to the woman holding Max, “Let go, Leslie, can’t you see you’re scaring the hell out of him? What’s going on here?”

Leslie did let go of his wrists but then took him by the shoulders. She slowly shouted into his face, “Yeah! What’s going on here! Son?”

Rodney’s deep chuckle came from behind the crowd.

“Whoa, Leslie,” Nadine said, “these people are our neighbors. That man in there is his father. Calm down.” She looked to Max for backup. He nodded urgently. “Some way to make a first impression. I have yet to even meet the man. Les, move out of the way so he can get out.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Where’s Kelly?” Everyone quieted down. Rocket continued whining in the house. When Leslie lifted herself off the car door, Nadine apologized to Rasheed through the window, looking at him as though he were a terrariumed creature she was inviting into freedom, telling him it was okay, it was all right, he could step out now, it was safe. No one understood he was trapped in there and only they, on the outside, could release him. Nadine must have thought he stayed inside out of fear of Leslie. Not hard to believe. Harder to believe was Max’s delayed action, how he too was trapped, inside his own body.

He finally spoke loudly enough. “We got locked in the car. He can’t open it from the inside.”

That’s when Rodney intervened, putting himself in the middle of Nadine and Leslie and Max. He let his gigantic body fall onto the car door, blocking Rasheed’s view. He put a hand in the air, calling for a moment of silence. “Now wait a minute,” he said, speaking with the slow irony of a stand-up comic building up to his punch line. “Before we open this door, we should at least be sure that it is not what it seems.” His mixture of too much cologne and alcohol and sweat made him smell like an overly ripe banana.

“No, Rodney,” Nadine said, reaching for the door handle.

“Hold on, baby.” He winked at her and pressed himself harder against the car.

Mr. Yang’s faint voice could be heard again from the cluster of guests. “Stop this. It is not right. You must open his door immediately!”

Someone else in the crowd said, “Yeah, give it a rest, Rodney. Let the man out.”

“Now let’s not beat around the bush here,” Rodney said. “Shouldn’t there at least be an investigation? Just to be sure?” Nadine shouted for Rodney to stop, but he ignored her. A grin curled his lips. He was having a good time.

Another man in the crowd said, “Rod, get out the way.”

“No, no. We can’t take the risk of covering up for some nasty-ass pervert. I mean, what if this man did molest this boy?” Rodney laughed.

Max shrieked, “He didn’t!”

Rasheed understood it clearly now and started punching the window, shouting, his voice muffled by Rodney’s mass blocking the door. “What! Pervert? Are you crazy? This is my son! This is my son! Get me out of here! Max, open this door!”

Max looked for Tim’s help and saw that he had stepped back into the street, watching from farther away. He was the only other person with a big voice and body who could stand up to Rodney. Why wouldn’t he help? Max hugged himself as though he’d suddenly gotten very cold.

Rodney looked at Max. “Oh, come on. I’m just messing around. Everyone knows that.”

Shaking his head in disappointment, Rodney moved out of the way. In the dark, Rasheed was a faceless, tortured beast. They gaped at him, observing his fury. Leslie said, “I think he Russian or something.”

This was too much for Rodney. “He Russian! He Russian!” he said as he bent over, slapping at his thighs like a person simulating laughter, repeating, “He Russian! Whoooeeeeee! He Russian!”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Rodney?” Nadine said as she let Rasheed out. Rasheed pounced out of the car, shoved past her, and went right for Rodney. The guests leaped forward
to stand in the way, a martini glass breaking on the ground, and formed an impassable barricade. Rodney stayed barely out of reach, smirking at Rasheed’s hopeless aggression.

Rasheed kept yelling, “How dare you! How dare you!” as he tried in vain to grab at Rodney between the others.

Rodney laughed some more, telling him he needed to chill out, it was just a joke. Everyone was squished together into one swaying organism. Bodies pressed against Max in all directions, someone’s drink spilling on him. His chin dented the roll at the top of Leslie’s back, his nose in her weave, and his pelvis grinding against her. Nadine kept ordering Rodney back home, but he wouldn’t move, he was enjoying himself far too much. A head taller than everyone, he looked like a spoon standing in the middle of a thick milkshake. Rasheed brandished his teeth, trying to thrash through the net of people. Max had never seen him so infuriated. Nadine pushed Rodney back through the others as hard as she could, aiming to get him off the driveway and across the street. One of the guests holding Rasheed back said, “It’s okay, no harm done. It was just a stupid joke,” but when Rasheed started screaming, “You dirty animal,” at Rodney, “you stupid stinking animal!” the energy shifted. People stopped wanting to reassure Rasheed and did less of a job at restraining him. Nadine looked back at him with revulsion for the use of that word:
animal
. Gasps traveled all around, along with clicking noises and loud exhalations.

“You’re just a sad little bigot,” Leslie said.

Max had forgotten to breathe for nearly a minute and let out a wheeze of air, trying to wrap his mind around why
animal
was inherently racist when pointed at a black person. Suddenly, by uttering that word, Rasheed had deserved it all. He deserved getting locked in and accused of molesting his son. Deserved being disrespected and neglected by his girlfriend and best friend.
Animal
was the word that did it—that made him bad.
The guests gave up on him. They wanted to go home now. The barricade loosened up even more. Rasheed charged forward. He jabbed his fist at Rodney but came up short, clipping Nadine in the ear. She hollered and grabbed the side of her head.

The universe froze. Rodney took in a big gust of air, barreling his chest out even more. He walked through Nadine, not checking on her as she held her ear. “Now you’ve done it, butt fuck,” he said. “You Russian faggot piece of shit. You faggot pervert, racist MOTHER FUCKER!”

“Stop it!” Nadine said, getting in front of Rodney again to drive him back, but to him she was only a strong wind.

A couple of the other men in the crowd tried to stop Rodney but had little more success than Nadine. Max’s eyes swept for Coach Tim one more time, even crying his name, “Tim!” But Coach was farther away than before. He responded to Max’s plea by averting his gaze and walking home, cap in hand, scratching at the top of his head.

More guests tried to help Nadine hold Rodney back, telling him it was okay, no harm done, it was a simple mistake, Nadine will be fine. But Rodney strode through them like they were stalks of corn. He reached over a small man to grab Max’s father by the bloodied wrist with his right hand, took another step, and flattened him against the car with his left. He spread his fingers wide, spanning most of Rasheed’s naked chest, pinning him. Rasheed tried to squirm out of Rodney’s grasp but quickly understood that he was in the grip of a man three times his strength. People pulled back on Rodney but couldn’t move him. He lifted his great flag of a hand and swung down on Rasheed’s cheek. He slapped him back and forth, unhurriedly and carefully, like he was performing a public lashing. Rasheed squalled with each hit. The longer Rodney battered him, the less anyone tried to stop it, as if it were too late now.

“Oh my God,” a woman said.

Max clasped the bottom corner of Rodney’s shirt and stared up at his father’s head twisting one way and then the other: forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. He pictured grabbing Rodney’s trunk of a neck and breaking his knuckles on that anviled face, but he was stuck; the scene had stupefied him. He tightened his fist around the piece of Rodney’s shirt. Rodney smacked Rasheed five or six times in all, and the whole thing probably lasted only seven or eight seconds, but when he’d finished, Rasheed’s face was raw and his nose oozed a slow, thick blood. Shirtless, his neck too weak to hold up his head, and his hand threaded with congealed blood, he looked like a giant newborn monkey. Rodney tossed him against the car and brushed Max’s hand away.

Rasheed threw his arms on the roof to steady himself, heaving for breath. The guests shuffled apart and made a narrow corridor for Rodney’s exit. Shame had infected everyone. People mumbled and scattered, got into cars, most of them leaving, some riveted into place. Nadine and a few others tried to help Rasheed into his house, but he flinched away from them and would only use Max as his crutch.

Max looked back to see Coach Tim standing on his porch, having watched it all without doing a damn thing.

Kelly had her arms crossed, still at the edge of Nadine’s yard. She glowered into the road, her shoulders bouncing up and down. It took Max a moment to realize she was crying. He’d never seen her cry, only heard it from behind a door. She went back into Nadine and Rodney’s. Who knew what kinds of things she told them. That Max’s father beat her? That he beat Max? That the Bouloses were hateful and racist? Russian? Perverts?

The Yangs called the police, but since Rasheed had attacked first, not much could be done, and besides, Rasheed didn’t want
to continue the fight. Over the next few days, he and Max shared a quiet disgrace. They had difficulty looking each other in the eye. Max stayed inside with Rocket, sipping vodka cranberries that were headier than usual and watching Nadine and Rodney’s house. The idea of running into Nadine terrified him much more than running into Rodney. It made him short of breath to think of her seeing him and his father as prejudiced. He would have to excuse Rasheed somehow. He could claim his father had a sort of Tourette’s syndrome, or that the word
animal
in his language meant “dickhead” and nothing else.

It was Coach Tim who had hurt Max most of all. Tim was no coward. He had not been too stupefied to act. No, of course not. Max’s anger funneled itself almost entirely into him. Rodney was so clearly evil, Rasheed so clearly the victim, and Nadine so clearly the heroine. Kelly’s opportunism and untrustworthiness felt inevitable somehow. His feelings toward these people, though strong, weren’t particularly confusing, but Tim’s inaction gnawed at him to the point of wrath. Max felt swindled. This man who had once been so loving toward them suddenly became the enemy, which felt no different from him having been the enemy all along, making their shared past instantly disingenuous, part of some larger deceit and fickleness. It only took jealousy about Kelly for Tim to drop them. Or was it even pettier than that? Was it the beard trimmer after all?

Pacing back and forth in the living room, Max fantasized about the putdowns and guilt trips he wanted to break Tim with. He’d swear to never, ever play basketball for him again, and tell him the reason he had done it in the first place was out of pity, because Tim was such a jealous, lonely man. Tim was beneath Max and Rasheed, and they spent time with him out of charity and goodness, but now it was evident that he deserved every ounce of the dejection that led him to drink like a fish. It was no wonder his wife had abandoned him in the middle of
the night, or that Danny Danesh called him a bald cup-a-fag behind his back. Coach Tim was a bald cup-a-fag. Fuck Coach Tim. Fuck him and everything he stood for.

There was a terrible disparity between the man Max now felt he needed to become and the kind of man he actually enjoyed being around. He admired Danny Danesh, for example—to have had his boldness and power in the moment his father was getting slapped around, to have had the courage to fight back, would have been a godsend—but Max didn’t care for Danesh. At the end of the day, Danesh was callous and mean. The trouble was, the men Max did care for were the gutless ones he feared becoming someday. Like his father, for instance, who let himself get trampled on by Kelly, or like Mr. Virgine, the art teacher who spent most of the class imploring students to sit back down or stop throwing paintbrushes. He was one of those permanently embarrassed people, incapable of toughness, and with a deep phobia of being offensive, especially regarding political correctness. If he said “African American,” it sounded like a new word he was timidly testing, or a question. And he referred to any female above the age of eight as a woman.

Max had stood near him once on the playground and overheard him speaking to Mrs. Marcus, saying, “Oh my goodness! What is that woman doing to him?” It took a while for Max and Mrs. Marcus to understand he was talking about a fourth-grade girl, Tiffany Stangl, straddling a little boy and giving him the typewriter, slapping at his face and drilling his chest with her fingers.

The other kids saw Mr. Virgine as a big joke. Once, in the middle of class, Danny Danesh had walked up to another kid and handed him a cigarette, less than a foot in front of Mr. Virgine.

Mr. Virgine said, “Excuse me, Danny, excuse me—what was that?”

Danny contorted his face violently, confidently. “What! I can’t even borrow him a pencil, yo?” as though Mr. Virgine had challenged his basic human rights. The classroom turned gruesomely silent, and Max could tell Mr. Virgine feared his students might riot against him if he insisted. It was in this moment, when he backed down and the classroom chatter resumed, that Max really fell for him. He fell for Mr. Virgine’s timidity and gentleness that went unhonored in a world run by the Danny Daneshes and Rodneys and Coach Tims. It perplexed Max that the good guys were the puny ones, the duds. They were what Danny Danesh called dick bags, and what a difficult life a dick bag seemed to have. Max had no idea how to avoid such a fate. He wanted to be courageous like Danesh, but did that mean he was required to become an asshole?

Max put on his fingerless biker gloves and went to his tree house with a bundle of blue nylon rope. He sat Rocket on the ground underneath the window so he could lower the slipknot he’d made down to her. Trying to get her to step into it, he wiggled the lasso around, but she only smiled up at him. He climbed back down and placed her paw in the lasso, tightened it, and went back up. The object of the game was to rescue her from some outside threat by lifting her into the tree house. She started whining the moment her body weight resisted the pull of the rope, her front paw raised above her head. He ignored the clear message that he was hurting her and kept pulling. He pulled for much longer than he should have—until she was standing on quivering hind legs—stubbornly committed to the fantasy of saving her. Finally registering her cries for what they were, he dropped the rope and inhaled the same chilling breath as when he jumped off a swing and soared for
that one death-promising beat. He ran down to her, unfastened the knot, and saw how raw her wrist had gotten. She licked his face, having either forgotten or forgiven that he had caused her pain. He put his ear to the top of her head and wept. His tears rolled off her forehead, and she batted her lashes to keep them from going into her eyes.