The Weight of Nothing Read online

  Niles glanced toward the table and the stack of books, spotting on top Camus’ The Rebel, followed by Thoreau’s Walden and essay on Civil Disobedience, next to Tahar Djaout’s posthumously published novel, The Last Summer of Reason. The books were dog-eared with tabs jutting out from several of the pages. Massinissa Alilouche observed Niles staring at the books, paused a moment, then turned and retrieved a legal-size envelope from the table and set the folder down on the pillow beside his guest. “What’s this?” Niles asked.

  “A gift,” Massinissa Alilouche answered. “All that you need.”

  Niles was skeptical, though he placed the envelope inside his backpack, and said, “Shoukran.”

  “There is nothing to thank me for,” the older man waved him off before asking as he always did at the start of one of their sessions, “How have you been, my friend?”

  “It’s been an odd month.”

  “Tell me.”

  For the last two years, once every few weeks and sometimes more, Niles had come to Massinissa Alilouche’s apartment in an effort to achieve a sense of closure, forgiveness and healing. That he’d chosen to discuss his troubles with a Muslim was perceived by some friends as strange, though no one was actually surprised given Niles’ tendency to favor alternative perspectives. Their arrangement began some ten months after the Reedum & Wepe was reduced to rubble and ash, and in the course of their conversations Niles learned a great deal from Massinissa Alilouche about the teachings of the Qur’an, Muhammad and Allah, and how in the East a man believes his fate is set 10,000 years in advance and peace is found in accepting the ensuing order.

  Recently however, their sessions together had turned querulous, with Massinissa Alilouche testing Niles’ conviction, and rather than embrace the challenge and feel secure in the decisions he’d made, Niles had surprised himself with how uncomfortable and defensive he’d been. After he finished recounting the events of the last month and what had him struggling to move forward, Massinissa Alilouche offered encouragement, only to say, “Perhaps your desire to reach a state of grace through acceptance is a false prophet. How can you have faith in what you’re doing if you’re not at peace with your decision?”

  “But I am at peace.”

  “Sahbee.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Then how do you explain?”

  “That’s different,” Niles interrupted.

  “Ibnee.”

  “I understand forgiveness is necessary.”

  “Ahh. So you feel obligated?” the man placed his hands on his legs, and shaking his head, inquired, “You are compelled?”

  “To do what’s right, yes.”

  “Then you are acting out of a sense of virtue, is that it?”

  Once again, Niles was confused by the man’s question, and shifting about on his pillow, answered, “I’m doing what I think is best. What anyone else would do in my situation doesn’t matter.”

  “Perhaps,” the older man moved his chair closer and sat now directly in front of Niles. “Then again is it not possible what you are doing is avoidance? Perhaps you are rebelling against a more human impulse.”

  “Forgiveness is a human impulse.”

  “Fehemt,” Massinissa Alilouche maintained a sober tone, and reaching for the top book on the table, offered a quote from Camus. “The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition…. (Nihilists) kill in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So then you’re a rebel,” Massinissa Alilouche leaned forward in his chair and touched Niles gently on his folded knee. “Dafee kwiyis. A minute ago you were the Lone Ranger. If you are a rebel, my friend, then you must believe in virtue. True rebellion must be noble at its core, and yet here is the problem, for rebellion is not innocent, and therefore virtue is not always easily resolved.” He flipped through the book once more and made his point by quoting again from Camus. “If rebellion exists, it’s because falsehood, injustice, and violence are part of the rebel’s condition. He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder…. Thus the rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil…. His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good.”

  Niles shook his head. “The type of rebellion you’re referring to has nothing to do with me. I’m not trying to change the world. I only want to get beyond what happened and move forward.

  “And yet you haven’t,” Massinissa Alilouche pointed a finger as Niles tugged at the sleeve of his shirt. His voice remained soft, and setting the book back on the table, he invited agreement where there might otherwise be none. “We are all seekers in our own way, don’t you think?” The expression on his face was tranquil enough to put Niles at ease even as he cupped both his hands around the younger man’s face. Niles returned the man’s gaze, then slowly pulled away. Massinissa Alilouche smiled, and continued their conversation by asking, “As a student at the university you are hoping to discover what, a greater understanding of the world or of yourself? Perhaps a combination of the two, for they are rather difficult to separate, like salt from the sea, no?”

  Niles shifted sideways on his pillow. “The two together, yes.”

  “A sense of Truth?”

  “A small sampling.”

  “It is all we can ask,” the man rolled his head forward again. “And yet, sometimes truth involves more than forgiveness, no?”

  Niles chose not to answer, did not understand why his host had taken this tact the last few sessions, and annoyed, clasped his fingers together tightly. Seeing this, Massinissa Alilouche leaned down from his chair and undid Niles’ grip, in the process speaking again advisedly. “In this world, circumstance is often uncooperative. Life tends to demand swift adjustments and even a complete transformation from the person we might otherwise think ourselves to be.”

  No longer interested in debate, Niles wanted only to leave and reached for his backpack. Before getting up however, he couldn’t help but respond, and said, “Sure, circumstance has a way of jerking and twisting everyone around, but people don’t morph into something new because of it. That sort of reaction is too easy. A person has to know who they are and maintain themselves despite external factors.” He gave as an example a baseball sitting inside a pitchers glove, then heaved forward, and an instant later launched by the swing of a bat three hundred feet in the air. “At no time does the ball become anything but what it is despite how much circumstance changes.”

  “And yet men are not balls, are they?” Massinissa Alilouche challenged him again. “A man has the ability to choose his trajectory while a ball is there merely to be acted upon.”

  “But everything is acted upon, you said so yourself. Circumstance sets the tone. The reason I’m here is because of things that have happened and still I’m free to respond.”

  “With forgiveness.”

  “Yes.”

  “But your impulse after all this time has not brought you peace.”

  Niles got up and stepped toward the door. He was holding his pack against his chest, his otherwise slender frame puffing a bit in order to show how eager he was to invalidate Massinissa Alilouche’s contentions. “No one said it would be easy,” he grimaced, realizing as soon as he said as much how foolish he sounded, yet unable to think of anything else, he fell silent and made his exit, no longer trying to explain what exactly was difficult for him and had continued to allude him month after month for nearly three years running.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE WAY THINGS HAPPEN

  “So?”

  “What?”

 
“Bailey, you need to cooperate here.”

  “OK. I’m ready.”

  “Tell me what you remember.”

  “The dark.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the light.”

  “When?”

  “In dreams.”

  “I see,” Emmitt writes this down in his notes, his stubby fingers curled around his pen, his hand inspiring black ink to fill the page with a sequence of tilted marks assembled into words counted on to give meaning to whatever I have to say. “Tell me about your dreams then, Bailey.”

  “I thought you didn’t subscribe to that sort of therapy, Dr. Speckridge.”

  “Fair enough. Tell me about the light.”

  “Elizabeth,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “And Niles.”

  “They were in your dreams?”

  “Again, Emmitt?”

  “I’m trying to determine what happened.”

  “You want to know what I remember?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But wasn’t I supposed to forget?”

  “I see you haven’t lost your ability to be difficult.”

  “A flaw in your theory?”

  “To the contrary. Not all things are meant to change. I told you that before we started.”

  “The permanence of the particular.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And as for what needs to be unremembered?”

  “You tell me.”

  And so I did.

  At one-fifteen in the afternoon I was still in bed, my right hand tucked deep into the waistband of my shorts, the rope attached to my left wrist running through the floor and down to Niles’ apartment. A Thursday, I didn’t have to teach though I was scheduled to meet with my committee at three o’clock to discuss the status of my dissertation and explain once more the cause of its delay. (After so many years of carrying on as a contented if uninspired adjunct, with false promises to complete my dissertation in Art History while playing piano a few nights a week at Dungee’s Bar and Grill, these occasional demands that I do more, when nothing suited me better, were unwelcome distractions in my otherwise safe routine.) I shifted onto my side, my back to the space where Elizabeth used to sleep. The emptiness was palpable, the idea of getting up too hard; I stared at the floor and the shadows that filled my apartment.

  After a few minutes, I managed to untie my wrist from the rope and go off to shower. My apartment was small, with a space for the bed, a desk and chair and books, a kitchenette, bathroom, and closet. The dresser was set along the far wall, while to the left, beside the stereo and otherwise dominating the entire space was Aunt Germaine’s old upright piano. Teak with pale white ivory, the piano was perfectly tuned and reasonably unblemished, carried up the stairs several years ago by six friends inspired by offerings of whiskey and ice served in jelly jars and plastic 7Eleven cups.

  I dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, then sat at the piano and played a slow version of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” while thinking of Elizabeth. Angry with myself, in order to become all the more miserable and as I deserved, I played next Dinah Washington’s “Bad Luck.” The tune had history, never failed to inspire the worst memories, beginning with the night I was forced to wait later than usual for my father to come get me from my Aunt Germaine’s. I fell asleep on the couch in her den, waking in the dark to angry voices from the front lawn. “Get out of the way, Germaine.”

  “I will not.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Doesn’t it though?”

  “I said move.”

  “I’m not letting Bailey go home with you, Frank. If you can’t show up sober and at a reasonable hour, I’ll have the boy move in here permanently with me.”

  “Take him, yes!” my father wasted no time responding. “That’s perfect. Why don’t you? After all that’s happened to me, why should I care?”

  “What’s that?” my aunt in turn. “How can you stand there and think about what’s happened to you when the boy’s lost his mother?”

  “His mother, don’t I know,” my father pounded his fist against his chest. “And what have I lost?”

  “We’re not discussing you, we’re talking about Bailey.”

  “A child. Children are born to leave their mothers. It’s my loss that goes on forever.”

  “My God. You can’t be serious.”

  “You know damn well it’s true.”

  “I know nothing of the kind.”

  “Hell. Hell!”

  I turned over on the couch and buried my head beneath my arms in an attempt to drown away the noise, but I could still hear the thunder of my father’s voice as he shouted outside, “What is it you think he wants from me? What does he expect? Goddamn, Germaine, Maria’s gone!” he howled this as if such had never been said before. “The best thing I can do is let Bailey see the world for what it is. We have no control. Fuck! I can’t do anything more for him. There isn’t any more, do you understand?”

  The sting of my father’s howl made me ache, and angry, I tried to think of something equally cruel to say, a weapon I could wield to let him know how disgusted and hurt I was by all his self-possession and singular sense of grief. Unable to put such feelings into words however, I chose another plan, something intended to shock my father into silence. As he rushed from the lawn and stormed up the steps, I hurried to the piano where I played “Bad Luck” from start to finish. My father burst into the room and nearly fell over. Germaine in the doorway covered her mouth in complete amazement as my hands moved expertly across the keys, filling the air with lush, plaintive tones, introducing riffs and flats and harmonic minors exactly as my mother taught me. (In heeding my mother’s advice, I had kept my talent a secret, preserving in this way the intimacy we shared while practicing only on the sly and when no one else was around.) As I finished, I came from the bench and stood in front of my father. His face was gape mouthed and pale as he said, “Bailey?” and louder then, “Bailey!” releasing a loud laugh, his huge arms swinging above his head as he asked me then to play more. “More! More!”

  But I refused.

  I moved off, defiant and cheerless, determined to show my father what it felt like to be denied, and shaking my head slowly from side to side, I declined his request absolutely.

  In the days following, my father hounded me with constant appeals and supplication, insisting my talent was not the sort of thing I could keep to myself, that such was obviously a gift from my mother, and “It’s her talent you’re keeping from me. It’s all we have!”

  I feared his harass, yet resented more his sudden interest in me and continued to spurn his petition. “Leave him be, Frank,” Germaine tried to intervene as my father came each evening now to my aunt’s house and chased me about, demanding I play for him. “You must!” he insisted, becoming enraged each time I said no. One night he arrived in a particularly foul temper, and as I refused him again he stormed off to the garage, returning a moment later with a hammer, threatening to pound the piano to pulp if I didn’t do as I was told. Such intimidation produced yet another nervous rejection—“No, Daddy”—at which point my father pulled six long nails from his pocket and charged the piano with menace. “Damn you then!” he wailed and drove the first nail down into the lid. “So help me God! If you won’t play for me, there’ll be no more! Do you understand? If not for me, you won’t play at all!”

  Germaine pushed my father out of the house and across the lawn, yelling, “You’re a no-good drunk, Frank! A no-good drunk!” The nail was removed, though the mark remained, and for the next several weeks I did my best to avoid my father. My effort proved in vain however as, undaunted, my father persisted in his demand, waking me in the middle of the night, tormenting me with threats and woeful pleading, referring to the world in tones of bleak and black reflection while speaking of my talent in forlorn references to his dear Maria. Such abuse took its toll and I turned for solace to my brother.

  �
��Shit,” Tyler laughed, a burly boy back then, man-sized at thirteen, built like a stevedore with meaty arms, barrel legs, and the square-jaw look of a brawler. “What did you think would happen?”

  “Yes, but?”

  “You never should have played for him.”

  “But…”

  “What? Hell, Bailey. Do you really think he’ll leave you alone now?” Here then was the sympathy I received, and disheartened, I retreated even as my brother called out, “I’m just telling you, for Christ’s sake.” We were, even then, quite different, Tyler and I. While I spent my time after school with Aunt Germaine, Tyler was six years older and balked at such supervision. His mood following our mother’s death was truculent and brutal. He fell in with the wrong crowd and undertook a course of serious mischief: petty thefts and break-ins, the trashing of parked cars, shooting pellets into the heads of dogs, uprooting mailboxes and traffic signs, twice slipping into warehouses to see what he could cart off, and once entering a mini-mart with the stock end of a rifle tucked into his belt. “For a laugh,” he said and cursed the cops who came to get him.

  Absent our father’s succor, and with our mother dead and buried, I retreated into myself, became timorous and developed a stutter. Tyler, in turn, stormed about, at one point dragging his mattress, his clothes and lamp, and forty-pound dumbbells down to the basement in order to separate himself from all things familiar. Confused by his distance and how he refused to demonstrate a fraternal interest in getting through our mothers death together, I tried just the same to distinguish between Tyler’s rage and that of our father. Unlike the barriers our father put up with thorns and thistle meant to do damage, Tyler’s hostility seemed a nervous defense, more fear than animus and like a sad dog barking.

  Three days after I spoke with my brother, I was surprised when he showed up at Germaines and hollered from the curb, “Tell Aunt Fat you’re coming with me.” A minute later I was giving chase through the neighborhood and out across the avenues where Tyler quickened his pace, cut down Ninth Street before disappearing into the shadows of the alley behind the old Haptree Theater. (A one-time hot spot for musical reviews and cabaret revivals, the Haptree closed years ago as the demographics of the city changed and audiences sought out different forms of entertainment.) Most of the windows were broken and boarded over, the blue paint peeled and the brick beneath grizzied and crumbling. Tyler stood atop a wooden crate and shoved back the boards. “Come on, come on,” he climbed inside and waited for me to scramble after him.