Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel by Karim Dimechkie Page A

cuddles and smiles. Rasheed said, in a weirdly polite tone, “This disturbs everyone, honey; it’s not important to know about all the bad truth in the world.”
    “Let’s ask Max what he thinks,” Kelly said. “Do you find these documentaries disturbing or educational?”
    He hated the responsibility of making decisions for himself. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. They’re okay, I guess.”
    “Not okay,” Rasheed said.
    “Okay,” Max said.
    Kelly snorted and shook her head. “Okay.”
    Max tried to respect his father’s wishes, but every time she put in another documentary, he felt judged as a coward for walking away. After a day of depriving himself of the films, obsessively wondering what he was missing out on, he came back to the couch. She seemed to respect his defiance.
    She asked what he thought of the Lebanese documentary, and he said it was hard to follow.
    “You ever talk to your dad about this stuff?” she asked.
    “I don’t think he likes talking about that.”
    “Yeah, I noticed. Why do you think that is?”
    He said, “When we are in America we are Americans.”
    “Yeah? And being an American in America means you can’t talk about the Middle East?”
    He wanted her to leave it alone. Her questioning felt like a violation of something that had been vaulted away for good reason. He trusted his father’s avoidance of this topic. Couldn’t she be satisfied that Max was already disobeying him about the documentaries? “I don’t know.”
    “What about your grandparents? What do they have to say about the war?”
    “I don’t have grandparents.”
    She looked confused. “I mean on your mom’s side. I know your dad lost his folks, but your maternal grandparents are alive, right?”
    He didn’t know how to disagree about such a black-or-white fact. Should they go back and forth, No they’re not, Yes they are, No they’re not, Yes they are , until one of them tired out? The suggestion that any of his relatives were still alive gave himslight vertigo. His heart tipped forward in his chest and he stared up at the ceiling for the rest of the conversation. No one is alive. There is only you and me now . His father’s voice enabled him to be blunt. “They all died. Killed by a robber.”
    “A robber ?” She intently watched the credits of the documentary, as if she were carefully reading the individual Arabic names, looking for someone in particular. “So, did that happen pretty recently then?”
    “Not really.” He hesitated before choosing not to tell her where they’d all been murdered and that his mother wore a cooking pot on her head. He had been trained to accept his mother’s story as a closed case and feared Kelly would question this in ways he couldn’t account for.

    He stayed in the tree house a lot when Kelly didn’t have a documentary playing. He’d already spent at least fifty hours sitting up there that summer, sweating in the dark raised sauna, confronting the infinite ceiling, and letting his mind go to sauce. When the light permitted, he drew on the walls some more. For the first time in his life, he found it simpler, more gratifying, to invent than to replicate things—like Danesh’s fishbowl—that had already happened.
    He filled the space around the fishbowl sketches with his imagination: a quilt of water spiders bobbing in unison to the sound of dancing helicopters overhead; gargantuan, sand-colored tongues wrestling in snow, their saliva melting everything, connecting the world with the seas, where they dominated as sea monsters, Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother floating by their side in a tree house–submarine. A couple of woolly mammoths trudging through the desert en route to that oversize golden peanut that awaited them on the horizon. A pack of smiling wolves lounging by the fire, playing marblesand chatting with overweight ninjas who wore mittens (hands were hard to draw).
    The process was cathartic, but once he stepped back, he immediately