Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (17 page)

He started speaking to the gymnasium’s hardwood. It took a moment for Max to register that he was listing things that people with only one arm cannot do: “Can’t button his jeans, can’t cut steak on a plate, can’t unscrew anything, can’t wash under his arms, can’t play guitar, can’t clap, can’t use scissors properly.” When Mr. Danesh noticed Max listening, his face transformed, and he smiled those woody teeth at him like he was about to sell something. “Hey! Jeff, right?”

Max shook his head, “No.”

“I ever tell
you
the time Danny got me to inject gasoline into myself?” he said with a touch of self-admiration.

He hadn’t told Max this or any other story. It was the first time they’d met.

“Well,” he carried on, “see, I’m a diabetic, and one day Danny gets the funny idea to fill up one of my syringes with gasoline.” He gave Max a severe look that implied he was about to give him the unfortunate truth about Danny. “So, I slide the needle up a vein—Danny couldn’t ever do that, see, you need both arms to inject yourself—and as I’m watching it disappear in me, I notice the color’s a little off, you know. I look up and see him there, smiling wickedly at me. And Jeff, I cannot begin to describe the burning sensation I felt at that moment in time. Like my insides were corroding. The fluid takes over me, and I bolt out of the house. I hit the street and sprint like hell.” He stood up and started miming his panicked running. “I could have won the goddamn Olympics with how fast
I was running. I ran down our street, through Copper Park, through downtown, through those farms before the airport, onto a runway, and just ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ran until I thought I was going to take off like a plane, and then—I stopped.” He sat down, beads of sweat ornamenting his upper lip. He slapped Max in the chest with the back of his hand and looked at him with screwed-up eyes. “You know why, Jeff?”

“No, why?”

“’Cause I ran out of gas.” He maintained a grave expression for a few seconds before laughing madly. Coach Tim gave him a reprimanding look. When Mr. Danesh finished cackling, he said to Max, “All right, that’s enough. See you next time, man. I’m going to find the champ.” He got up and walked in the direction Danny had gone. It was the first time Max was consciously grateful to not be in Danny’s shoes.

Max now rotated his chicken sandwich 360 degrees in his hands. “And what did he say to that? When you told him you’d fuck him up for real next time.”

“Nothing. He just looked at me like I stole his manhood or something. Or like he just woke up and didn’t know where he was.”

“What’s your stepmom say?” Max asked.

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Your dad or whatever.”

He stared down the length of the cafeteria table. “I tell her not to talk back to him. She gets it worse if she does.” After a while, he plopped his arm on the table in front of his tray, as if he suddenly needed to protect his food. “Sometimes I even tell her she should leave his ass and take me with her. But she says she loves him too much. Makes me want to kill him.”

Later on, when Max was no longer drawn to the derisive outlook he and Danesh had briefly shared, they stopped sitting together at lunch without any more of an official good-bye than they had a hello.

At the end of Max’s sophomore year, when he’d all but forgotten about Danny Danesh, he learned that he’d gotten into drugs and overdosed on OxyContin. The story was all over campus. They said he’d flatlined and been revived by the paramedics twice. When he came back to school he temporarily resumed his role as the center of attention. His having died twice fascinated everyone, but the fascination lasted less than a week before he was discarded all over again.

Max was eager to talk to Danesh about his experience and sat with him at lunch one more time. He asked him what it was like to be dead, remembering how he’d almost died at the Yangs’. But Max hadn’t quite crossed over to the other side like Danny had.

Danny looked embittered by Max’s presence. To him, Max was like all the others, a deserter.

“I mean, I’m sorry to bug you, man,” Max said. “I’m sure you’re sick of telling people about it, but I just really want—”

“Yeah. I guess I am sick of telling it. You’ll find out on your own anyway. You all will.”

“But not live to talk about it.”

“What the fuck does living to talk about it change?”

“Just tell me this, was it scary?”

“Do I look like a fag to you?”

“I—”

“All right.” He sighed and leaned in a little closer. “If you want to know the truth, it was fucking awesome. You finally get to stop holding on, you know.”

“Holding on.” Yes, Max did recall a feeling of letting go at the Yangs’. His terror was climaxing into immense lightness before he was brought back down to life.

“Exactly. You don’t realize how much effort it is to hold on to this garbage.” He gestured to encompass their surroundings, and took a long drink of chocolate milk. “Even if you just sat here all day like a big piece of shit, without moving at all, you’d still get super tired. Ever think of that? You’d eventually fall asleep just from sitting here and doing nothing because it takes a fuck ton of centripetal force of physics or whatever the fuck just to keep your body alive. It’s like, no matter what you do, you’re using up your life to stay alive. To hold on. But fuck it.”

What Danny said made sense. “Yeah. Fuck it.” Death was probably the easiest thing on earth. Easier than just sitting here and doing nothing. You couldn’t possibly screw it up. You were just cleared. Ready to go. Freed. Nevertheless, believing this didn’t stop death from rumbling beneath all surfaces. Didn’t stop it from itching all of the time.

Around then, Rocket got lupus. Max and Rasheed took her to the vet when she started losing hair in patches. They gave her antibiotics and vitamin E pills, a topical ointment for her lesions, fatty acid supplements, and oral corticosteroids. They nailed her doggie door shut and let her out only after lathering waterproof SPF on her face and ears and bald spots.

Nadine and Max talked a lot about sad things without necessarily seeking answers. They knew there was no ultimate solution to being afraid of dying, for example, or the boundless source of what’s-the-point questionings, or her regret at not giving more to her father before he’d killed himself. Her venting and confessions and self-deprecations were ways of rephrasing that Life Is Hard, not with the expectation of finding an actual solution but as a conversation piece to play with, to connect through, to see what else it inspired. Max
and Nadine rephrased Life Is Hard to each other to feel understood, since feeling understood is the predecessor to feeling truly loved.

By the time he was seventeen, Max’s skin had cleared up, his body had thickened, black hair whirled from his chest, and he shaved his face clean every day before school. He’d become a handsome man that women at the grocery store took notice of. He didn’t respond to this new attention. He only wanted Nadine. She was the sole person in his life whose strength and poise and humor he admired, and who was also fundamentally kind.

After one of their dinners, she asked him if he’d ever had sex. This was the first topic he bald-facedly lied to her about. He told her he was sleeping with a girl from his English class, unconsciously describing the fictional girl as an older version of the little woman at the Yangs’ from years before.

Nadine filled up her wineglass. “What’s her name?”

“L—indy.”

“Sorry?”

“Lindy.”

“Lindy? Okay. What kinds of things do you and Lindy do together?”

“What do you mean, like what positions?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Oh, we do pretty much everything.”

“Yeah? Are you any good at it?”

“At what? Sex?”

“Yeah.” She gave a knowing smile that reminded him of their age difference. She knew he was full of shit.

“She seems to think so.”

“Oh, yeah? Where do you guys do it?”

“All over. Her car, her house, my house, in fields.”

She outwardly laughed at him now. “Really? Fields? And she’s been over to your house? I’ve never seen her.”

He smiled now too. “No, well, she comes in either really early in the morning or late at night. “

“That’s smart, keeping it discreet like that. It’s really nobody’s business but yours. And so you go to her house too?”

“Sure, I’m there all the time. Usually after school. I go over there and, you know, we talk some, and then we get all—sweaty.”

“You get all sweaty.” She looked down and pretended she was trying to conceal her laughter.

“Yeah, definitely, we get all sweaty, and then I leave before her dad comes home, and everything’s great. Okay, well what about you, when was the last time you got any?”

“I’m not nearly as active as you.”

“Oh, come on! I see guys coming over, and what about that guy Graham you were seeing? That was like two weeks ago.”

“Forget about Graham, that’s boring. Tell me what kinds of things she does to you. I’m curious.”

“Who?”

“Lindy.”

And he did. Through Lindy, he spelled out the fantasies he’d been having about Nadine for years. His descriptions felt risqué, but she only laughed.

Rasheed was home for about an hour in the evenings. It’d been years since Max made a point of choosing to be there to share his company. Max was usually across the street during this hour, and Rasheed had yet to even knock on Nadine’s door, let alone try to establish a respectful rapport. The Yangs hardly ever saw Rasheed either. He spent the little free time he had alone or at Coach Tim’s.

Rasheed said to Max once, “It is strange that your only friend is an old single black lady.”

With a cool rage Max didn’t know existed in himself, he said, “She’s not old, and I don’t see what her being single or black has to do with anything.”

Max felt he’d surpassed his father, knew more than him now. They were tense and self-conscious the rare times they were around each other, talking with a choppy and unfamiliar cadence. They seemed to be in each other’s way, the hall and living room too small for both of them. In the kitchen, one always blocked the cupboard the other needed to get to. Max ate standing, hurriedly, and tried to get in and out of there as quickly as possible to avoid having to share the space with Rasheed. Speaking more than a few words would have given away what they kept from each other. At this point, the main thing they kept from each other was whether they noticed or cared about the degradation of their relationship. Max didn’t know how they had remained stuck in this awkward formality for so long, and he couldn’t remember what kinds of things they’d talked about before. All he knew was that his father’s presence mined his energy, made him feel weak and tired.

Just as when Kelly was around, they maintained this amazing capacity to ignore the elephant in the room, to never address the strong, though annoyingly unspecific, feelings rocking their home from its very foundation. Rasheed probably thought Max would grow out of his need to distance himself, that things would go back to the way they were in time, that it would pass on its own, like bad weather.

Rasheed was getting two to three flus a month. Max brought food and water to his room, but nothing more. No stories, no good lies. The longer this standoff persisted, and Rasheed’s bouts of depression sagged him, the colder Max became. But in a not-so-distant fold of Max’s consciousness, he understood the truth. His father’s increased depression was because he’d lost his son. Max wouldn’t dignify this with much thought. Why
should the onus be on him to give Rasheed back his position as the center of Max’s universe? Even if Max wanted to, he couldn’t give him that. Rasheed was not the center. So Max carried on silently, his father’s despair hanging off him, pretending to be unfazed by the strain it caused. He told himself that allowing Rasheed to see how much he hated his depression would be precisely what encouraged it.

When Max felt guilty about ignoring Rasheed’s sadness, he evoked the memory of his father’s disrespect of Nadine and his continual rejection of her. This helped him get angry enough to shut him out again.

Max told Nadine about the adventures of Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother. “Every once in a while, when my dad couldn’t come up with new episodes, Kip and his Man-Dog got into situations that were identical to scenes from
The Adventures of Tintin
, or
Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park
, and once, even
Dances with Wolves
.” Nadine smiled. “The weird part is that not only did I not let on that I noticed he was copying those other stories, but I was actually able to forget that I’d heard them before. I could listen to them as if for the first time, as though everything he said was completely original.”

“Now that’s filial devotion,” she said. “Don’t make that face—I think it’s sweet.”

“No, it’s messed up. It’s like I brainwashed myself into thinking that everything he did or said was perfect.”

“You just loved hearing him tell stories.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Don’t most kids eventually call their parents out on their bullshit? It’s like I wouldn’t ever let myself be disappointed. That’s got to be unhealthy.”

“Well, you’re expressing disappointment now, aren’t you? Are you really going to sit here being disappointed that you weren’t disappointed sooner?”

“Feels late.”

“What will feel late is if you let this tension drag out any longer.”

Nadine urged him to open his arms to Rasheed more, give him the affection he obviously thirsted for, even if he didn’t know how to ask for it. She told Max to spend less time at her place and to be with Rasheed when he came home, that this disappointed phase would definitely pass. Max resolved not to talk to her about his father anymore. When she told him she felt like she’d come between them, he swore his problems with Rasheed had nothing to do with her.

“Whatever it is, don’t waste your time being mad,” she told him. “You’re not teaching him any lessons this way, and you won’t always have the chance to be with him whenever you feel like it.”

Max and Nadine were peeling cucumbers at the sink, her bare shoulder grazing him from time to time. He stared out her kitchen window at the vein-blue sky, the rust of sunset slowly getting scrubbed away.