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

promise. It’s all right. I’m going to walk you through this. I’m not going to leave you, honey. Don’t worry. Now turn over onto your stomach.” Indignantly, he did. He turned away from her, facing the wall. “Good. Now go ahead,” she said, “move up and down so it rubs against the bed.” Unsure as to why, when she told him what to do, rooting him on in eerily soothing tones, he obeyed. He rubbed slowly at first, then with a certain determination. Kelly patted his back, like she was burping an infant. Rocket exhaled loudly, and Max felt pathetic but couldn’t stop. He rubbed harder and harder, and gradually brought himself closer to her, turning to face her with his eyes sealed shut. Her hair touched his face. She didn’t move away; she lay still, repeating, “It’s all right, you’re doing fine, you’re almost there,” until he found himself actually rubbing it against her thigh. Their skin never made direct contact, and she showed no sign of there being anything remotely sexual about it on her end. This made it so much worse, as though she were making a brave sacrifice for him. When he came, she said, “Goooood,” like when a dog fetches a stick.
    She swept his bangs off his sweaty brow and kissed the tip of his nose. He heard her lips part into a smile. “There. Now you know how to do it. Anytime you have those urges, you can justdo that by yourself and feel good about it, okay? No shame.” Before leaving, she imposed a final meaningful pause that seemed to say, We’ve just shared something so special .

    Danny Danesh once drew a naked woman on his stomach, her legs spreading open from his bellybutton. Fascinated by this image, Max went home and did the same to himself, staring at the disproportionately large vagina in the bathroom mirror. He put his pinkie inside it like Danny had done for his friends. The physical discomfort of touching the knot of scar tissue back there was something Max kept going back for well after he’d scrubbed the woman away. Whenever he needed to be uncomfortably invigorated, he jammed his pinkie into his navel. It had the same allure for him as licking a nine-volt battery over and over, or continuing to sniff the air when something foul lingered in it.
    He was lying in his tree house now, cramming both pinkies into his belly button, when he heard his father’s voice. “What are you doing in here?”
    Max, who’d been grunting from the discomfort he caused himself, sat up. “Nothing.” It took a while to make out the outline of his father’s head, poking up into the tree house.
    Rasheed said, “We are going to play board games with Kelly. I bought the Game of Life today. Come inside.”
    “All right. Dad?” he asked his father’s shadow of a head. “Did my mom teach a peasant how to read in her father’s living room?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Kelly told me.”
    Max stared at him long enough for Rasheed to feel the need to say something more. In a single breath he said, “She got into fights with her father when he came home and saw bunches of peasants sitting around the coffee table. That’s all.”
    “Bunches of peasants? I thought it was just one peasant.”
    He sighed. “Listen, there may have been one or there may have been bunches. I don’t remember. The point is she wanted to help the world, like Kelly. She was incredibly tough cookies, just like Kelly. So tough that she didn’t tolerate people very well who asked too many questions about her or who didn’t care about the Game of Life.” He slapped the tree house floor twice to get Max moving. “Okay, come down now.”
    Max avoided Kelly’s eyes as they played the board game that didn’t resemble anyone’s life he knew of. Rasheed and Kelly drank and laughed a lot as they played. They looked happy. Max felt sad but did an excellent job of hiding it. He went to bed before they finished, claiming he was just sleepy.
    The next morning, Sunday, his father’s day off, Max shuffled