Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel Read Free Page B

inhaling loudly. “Dad!” Max yelled, having almost knocked over his drink. Rasheed followed him around the house like a starved zombie.
    Max escaped to his room and fell asleep in Rocket’s bed with her. A tremendous fatigue had piled in after touching his mortality. When he woke up, Rasheed sat on Max’s bed, still lookinglike an illness ate away at him. He presented two plates of peas and tiny burned hamburgers and a pool of ketchup. Max rubbed his eyes and breathed in the dinner, suspecting nothing had been salted or spiced. Rasheed said Coach Tim and the Yangs had stopped by. Mr. Yang brought a baby cactus for Max that looked like a green bump in a pot. He also gave Rasheed his business card to pass on to him. The card read MR. YANG : 1 (856) 567–5308.
    Rasheed handed it to Max. “For emergencies.”
    “But I know this number.” He’d had the Yangs’ home line memorized since he was five.
    “It is in case you forget during the emergency.”
    “But they still live next door, right?” He feared he’d been asleep for months.
    Rasheed clucked his tongue to end the conversation.
    He usually told Max wonderful stories, but tonight he narrated a joyless episode of a series he’d invented about a guy named Kip and his Man-Dog of a brother. The Man-Dog was a naked guy on a leash, behaving like a dog. Rasheed had originally introduced them as a man named Kip and this other man, Doug, but after Max fell into a fit of giggles at the misheard version, Rasheed decided to go forth with the Man-Dog character, and this probably allowed him to get a lot wilder with the stories than he would have otherwise. Kip and the Man-Dog started off by doing mundane things like going grocery shopping or to the movies, but then something fantastical would happen: they might get surrounded by incandescent lizard-men or find themselves on a meteor where the Man-Dog needed to dig and hollow out its center so that it gravitated to the earth as softly as a piece of popcorn. It turned into a joke for Rasheed to change the Man-Dog’s name every time, from Sam to Brandon to Dylan to Patrick and a few others. Max pretended to be outraged by this name switching and told him it didn’t match the name he’d usedthe time before, and Rasheed claimed Max was the one forgetting. This evening, Kip and the Man-Dog sat in a classroom. The Man-Dog inexplicably had magical earlobes, and flung them out and cracked his teacher’s butt while she wrote something on the chalkboard. Rasheed mimed the whip of the earlobe by snapping his fingers in an uncomfortably serious way.
    After they’d finished eating, Max fake-slept. Though he never would have said so, he felt like being alone. When his father finally left, he counted backward from one hundred before sneaking out to his tree house. Once up there, he thought of that final rush of peace that blew into his body at the Yangs’, like he was death’s balloon. He stuck his head out the little window and folded his waist over the ledge, putting his weight on his abdomen. As he tipped forward, his feet got lighter and lifted off the ground. If he let himself go much farther, his back half would pick up speed and fling him upside down. He’d slip out and fall on his head. He leaned forward anyway, and it happened just as he’d anticipated. All at once. He heard himself make a helpless karate-man sound, hi ya , as his legs flipped up and tried to shoot over his back. His calves caught the inside wall above the window, toes pressing hard against the ceiling, hands squeezing the ledge, blood swelling the brain. His black hair hung straight down. A weightlessness cleaned out his chest as he imagined his skull cracking open and, for some reason, envisioned only sand spilling out. He saw a flash of his father and Coach Tim, Rocket, his bedroom, his school, the Yangs, and again, his father, ruined. Rocket traipsed out of the house and sat on the grass under him, yawning up at the top of his head. He didn’t want