Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel by Karim Dimechkie

of men you’d think had been living underground for fifty years, smoking, drinking whiskey, and dissecting maps. Max watched cop batons come down on bloody-faced black men, still shots of gun executions and hangings, emaciated children sleeping in the mud, the ghostly newspaper-print smiles of victims or villains, prisoners crammed like chickens, orphans clawing at a roll of bread, the bloated and the diseased, lesions that looked like shreds of tongues,piles of twisted bodies, and court cases that decided the ends of lives. Most disturbing were the people on the screen who remained calm and reasonable in interviews, with humor and a warm gaze, but had perpetrated some of history’s most inhumane acts of violence. It was this two-facedness that challenged Max’s sense of safety worst of all.
    The evils flickering on the screen mixed with his proximity to Kelly’s body forced him to shed a layer of skin. His life had been so simple before Kelly and her documentaries, so undisturbed and regular. And while he missed how uncomplicated things were before the world outside of Clarence began creeping in, this darker form of learning absorbed him absolutely, and he spent more and more time with Kelly and her films.
    He surprised himself when he asked her to get a documentary about the civil war in Lebanon. She was proud of him for making the request and from that point on asked for his opinion on what they watched. She started cursing around him too, and he liked that. It excited him when she verbalized her moral and political stances with intensity. Though she usually wasn’t speaking directly to him but more to herself, her views challenged him in ways that had never crossed his mind and that no other adult had ever brought up: health care is a human right and the government should treat it as such; of course gay marriage should be legal; it’s unethical for anyone to make over a few hundred thousand dollars a year when others suffer dire poverty, and there should be a nationwide salary cap enforced; if redistribution of wealth creates a just society, then inheritance should be illegal; if you really believe in fairness, then do away with national borders and establish a world democracy; guns ought to be banned, period. He and his father didn’t discuss the rights and wrongs of the world, and school had never insisted much either, let alone introduce the stimulating philosophies Kelly asserted.
    The images of the Lebanese civil war documentary gave some visual context to the country and its conflicts, but the story itself remained a confused mess. There was no government or police in the Lebanon of this movie, only militarized clans, missile-striped skies, cadavers that took time to decipher as such, wailing mothers, slow zoom-ins on bullet wounds that looked like squashed cherries, and groups of children hiding behind dilapidated walls from masked men with machine guns. Max could not have imagined a greater hell.
    It was around this time that he became truly afraid of death. An opening cleared inside him, and the terror that enlaces everything rushed in like bleaching light. All things seemed qualified to kill him now. All planes were capable of dropping bombs, all men of pulling out revolvers, all coughs and sneezes and meats and fruit of being the start of lethal viral epidemics, and the roof of his tree house was always on the verge of collapsing on his face, either disfiguring or ending him.
    He told his father that they’d borrowed the documentary on his home country, and Rasheed demanded he stop watching such depressing things. In fact, he ordered Max to stop watching documentaries with Kelly altogether. Max acquiesced immediately, feeling he’d been saved from his own wretched curiosity. He knew he couldn’t have given it up alone.
    Kelly said, “But why? These films tell the truth. What’s the harm in that?”
    Max clamped up. He’d yet to hear them disagree since she moved in. They’d exchanged nothing but