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

window crank in the voice of a doctor demanding a scalpel. Max got the tool from the glove box and slapped it into his father’s hand. The screw thread on the inside of the crank was mostly stripped, and it took a delicate touch to catch it on the door and get the window to come down. With only onecrank, Rasheed was strict about keeping it in the glove compartment, as if someone might steal it. When Max had once teased him about this, Rasheed asked, “If you think this is so funny, you may tell me where the three other window cranks went, huh?”
    After Rasheed got his window down and opened his door, he jogged around the front, making a funny blowfish face through the windshield, and opened Max’s.
    In the department store Rasheed insisted on buying Max any shirts or pants he glanced at. Watching his father spend money on things he didn’t need was a guilt-ridden experience. When Max told him he didn’t want so much clothing, Rasheed said, “It’s a big pleasure for me to buy you gifts. Do you want me to stop having this pleasure?”
    At one of the T-shirt racks, Rasheed gazed at a fluorescent ceiling light as he worked his thumb and pointer into his nostril, extracting a hair. He held the white-rooted hair to the light and examined it as though he’d found a bone that might be the missing link to a prehistoric mystery. Max mustered the courage to say, “Kelly seems a little upset these days.”
    “What? What are you saying, Max? What happened?” Rasheed dropped the nose hair.
    “I mean, are you two happy behind closed doors?”
    “What is this question?”
    “Why is she always acting like you did something horrible?”
    “Oh, come on. She is having the rough patch in her life, Maxie. Be bigger hearted, please. We don’t have very good work situations, and she feels maybe unstable.” He put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “When a woman is feeling like this, we must be even more patient and loving and tell her everything is all right. Never forget this. When she is upset, you must wait nicely for it to be over, like bad weather. There is nothing to do about it. It will pass. Like weather. Right?”
    “Right.” Though with bad weather you take cover, or put on more layers. In any case, you defend yourself.

    Back from shopping, they pulled onto their street to drop off their things and get dressed up before going out to dinner. There were cars lined up along both curbs. “Wow,” Rasheed said, seeing a party through Nadine and Rodney’s living room window, “a lot of African Americans, huh?” They parked in their driveway and Rasheed asked for the crank.
    For at least ten minutes, Rasheed tried catching the screw to get the window down. The crank had finally been stripped clean and would not work again. They were trapped.
    “Why is it like this?” Rasheed said. His breath was harsh because he never drank water. He said he already ate food with water inside it—“like apples, hamburgers, pieces of pie, all of these things have water inside. I don’t like to be chugging liquids directly, this makes me feel like I’m drowning, and I want to vomit.”
    It was dusk. The tendons in Rasheed’s forearms twitched, shaking his canopy of arm hair as he tried the crank again and again. He tried all the windows, but none of them worked. The lights in the house were off; Kelly wasn’t home.
    “Okay,” Rasheed said, “I must break this window.”
    “Dad.” Max thought they should back out of the driveway and honk at the neighbors’ party. Someone would surely come out to help them.
    Rasheed ignored him and stabbed at the window twice with the crank, like in a horror movie.
    “Dad?”
    The crank sliced his hand open, and he yelped, “Shitman!” Blood flowered out of his palm. Rasheed took off his shirt and wrapped his hand in it, the red soaking through. Flustered, Maxtook off his shirt too and handed it to him. Rasheed contemplated it for a second before tossing it on the dashboard.
    He ordered Max to the