Shards: A Novel (12 page)

The houselights went down and then right back up again and it was all over. There was applause like rain upon a sunroof and boos like birds fighting birds, and I didn’t bow but had to find a quiet spot, for the world was suddenly too much for me, standing there drenched and gasping, existing in it. I didn’t know that time could be so dense, so true, and that a sliver of it could envelop you like that, overpower you.
Then
was as dense as
now
is fleeting. I was aware of
then
as I wish I were aware of
now
right now instead of writing about then; it’s pathetic.

A few days later we watched the recording. On the videotape this . . . person marched around the stage, his feet crunching down on the floor like he had a beef with Mother Earth. He knew all the lines. His smile was maniacal, something I hadn’t seen before, couldn’t even imagine before. Later I tried to smile like that on my own and failed. My face muscles simply wouldn’t stretch and flex in those ways. He had my ponytail. And my wide thumbs. And I knew in my head, intellectually, that it was me; I had blisters on my feet to prove it, too, but . . .

It couldn’t have been. It was someone reminiscent of me, for sure. But I don’t remember any of it, as if I was put on hold for the duration of the play, as if the archetype that is Father Karamazov rented my body to rave and rage and show me how it’s done. The tape rolled and he marched. Asmir kept analyzing, praising, finding faults in others, patting himself on the back.

“This is amazing,” he said. “You guys have to be aware of what we accomplished with this play.”

I just sat there rubbing my thumb into my wrist, feeling the heat, proving to myself that I was there doing that.

Something happened right after the show, an incident. Brada and the other Torso Theater seniors summoned us all to the green room, walking silently among us like health inspectors around a questionable establishment, with long coats and everything. Shit was a-brew, I could just see it. They sat us down but remained standing themselves, Intimidation 101. They murmured to one another while keeping us in silence, waiting for Asmir, who was still out there talking to people.

“What’s happening?” someone asked them. The answer was hissed. Apparently a bunch of people walked out because they didn’t know what to make of the play. Didn’t understand it. Booed it. Asked for their money back. Add to that the fact that another bunch never showed due to the morning shelling and that we were rather cavalier with our comp tickets, giving them to a considerable bunch of friends and family. Money that was expected to be made was not made. They were furious.

“You’ll have to perform this another ten times just to break even,” Brada said with malice.

There was silence after that. Brada and his buddies stood by the door, hands crossed at the crotch. They looked like Communist
politicians paying last respects to a dead comrade. We, the partly costumed performers, still between the two worlds, still beautifully empty between reality and art, tried to occupy as little space as possible and waited for something concrete to establish itself. Silence played tricks and seconds stretched into hours, but it was already wearing off when Asmir came in with Bokal right behind him.

“This is just for the company members,” Brada said, attempting to dismiss Bokal, who lumbered by him as though he weren’t even there.

“What’s it to you?” Bokal asked without inflection and to no one in particular. He gave me a high five and sat down next to me.

“Well, that was the worst performance of the worst play in the history of the universe,” Brada said to Asmir.

I looked at the carpet.

“I trusted you to put up a show that people would want to come and see, not a show that makes people threaten to break the glass and strangle me in the booth if I don’t give them their money back.”

I went over the patterns on the carpet, memorizing the angles of designs, the subtle shifts in coloring, the locations of stains, anything just not to be there in full. Asmir sounded quiet and confused.

“Who are we trying to appease here, the judicious or the groundlings? ‘The censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.’”

“What are you talking about? I’m not gonna debate you. We’re taking the Torso Theater logo off the poster and you are going to perform this shit until it pays itself off. Then you can do whatever you want with whomever you want.”

“When you don’t have quality you have to compensate with quantity,” said another one of the seniors.

What happened next branded me.

What happened was that Asmir unreeled. The self-taught know-it-all with confidence and know-how up the wazoo, the king of his theatrical kingdom, this man peeled off and what was left in his stead was a child, an angry, hurt child. And I loved him for it, for this nakedness and innocence and passion. He went from age twenty-five to five in an instant, bawling at the injustice and ignorance, at the malice of people who knew only profit and wouldn’t know art if Dalí signed their limp, melting dicks.

“It’s the way it is,” Brada said—ignoring the uncoiled, sobbing Asmir—his lizard eyes scanning a piece of paper in his hands. “Tomorrow you’ll go perform in Lukavac, then two more here on Friday and Saturday. Then we’ll see where we’re standing.”

“You have . . . no clue . . . ,” Asmir blurted in between spasms.

“It’s the way it is,” Brada repeated and smiled. Smiled. He actually smiled. “I think we’re almost finished here.”

Silence filled the green room like gas. Asmir’s tear ducts were empty, spent. Only the motions of crying persisted. We sat inside our rigid bodies, containing our screaming minds with the conditioned limpness of will, an instinct, really, when you’re young and dealing with long coats reminiscent of the Communism you grew up in. The patch of carpet in front of me was memorized. It lasted forever.

“Can I say something?” Bokal asked, rupturing everything. It was a rhetorical question.

“You’re not even part of this group,” said one of them, a short middle-aged guy with a mustache. Bokal didn’t look at him.

“You people are dicks,” he said.

“What?”

“You are dicks! The man is crying here. What’s wrong with you?”

“You have no voice here,” Brada said, his smile wiped out finally. “I’ll have to ask you to leave!”

“
You
’re gonna ask
me
to leave? Do it, by God! Let me hear you ask me to leave!”

Brada was perplexed for only a moment, and he would have come up with something cruel any second had Bokal not stood up in his bubbling fur-lined jacket and taken a step forward. Brada aborted the comeback in his throat.

“Well?”

“Calm down,” Brada said, suddenly a peacemaker. “We’re all on edge here. I was just stating the facts.”

“No, you were treating people like shit. And I’m not gonna
ask
you to leave. I’m gonna tell you to get the fuck out of this room before I spill you like a bag of rice.”

The Torso Theater seniors, all of them grown men, tucked their tails and drew back toward the door like in a movie. Brada looked at Asmir:

“Is he making your decisions for you now?”

“Yes he is,” Asmir said.

“Fuck off! They don’t need you!” Bokal said and took another step forward.

“You’ll never work in this town again!” Brada said and followed his buddies out.

“Fuck the town in which the likes of you have that power!”

That was it.

That night, on the way back home, I tore my Torso Theater membership card into four pieces and threw them into a gaping garbage container. The moon was frozen to the night, stuck in its vast blackness, witnessing. Like a perfect bullet hole in the tinted window of a Black Maria.

Mother waited up for me, playing solitaire on the kitchen table next to an empty ashtray, her forefinger lightly touching the partition
of her lips. By this point in the war our funds were scarce, and cigarettes were expensive. Her hands would shake, constantly flying up to her face to handle the phantom cigarette, and finding nothing, would flutter around sheepishly like a pair of confused sparrows, only to end up on a deck of cards or on her lap, twitch there in agony for a while and then try again. She said that this character was the best thing I’d ever done artistically—so much so that my transformation terrified her and that the play blew her away, that she forgot about smoking. Coming from her—with her tough-love, no-bullshit approach to everything my brother and I did—the comment made my chest expand with joy and suffering. In my bed, I wept with it.

The next day, during my quasi-continental breakfast of barely baked bread (sporadic electricity), plum jam, vegetable fat, and chamomile tea, there was a telephone call. I was expecting it. Asmir had bounced back with a fuck-the-Torso-Theater attitude, with new ideas swarming in his mind, new confidence and vigor, new drive, his gums flapping nonstop: “New group, new approach, new rehearsal place, new everything.” It was like I was getting a double dose of Asmir and it was intense and exciting and terrible. He asked me if I wanted to be a part of it all and I said yes . . .

. . . because he cried the night before when the vultures were tearing apart his baby. Because he was a five-year-old and I wanted to play.

From then on the theater became a playground rather than an office, a lab rather than a classroom, a religion rather than a hobby, a cult rather than a troupe. It became everything.

Bokal wanted to do a painting of the troupe, so Asmir made a hefty wooden frame on which the canvas was to be stretched and lugged
it across town to the new rehearsal place. We moved from the Home of the Army to my old neck of the woods, the Home of the Youth. Instead of the stage and auditorium, now we had a large room stuffed with crap: generic, Communist-looking chairs, dismembered drum kits, a selection of snapped mic stands, a behemoth of a filing cabinet made of solid wood, and dirty-beige curtains you’d just love to set fire to. The reason that we even got
this
room was that nobody else wanted it. All its windows faced southeast, making it a very likely target for a mortar.

The carpet was the color of decomposing cigarette filters with a fragrance to match. My God, everything happened on that carpet, from shit to divine intervention, from trivial drudgery to magic. Everything. It was on that carpet, in the moist, sweltering air and pungent dust, barefoot and aching from theater and life, that I was the happiest. My God, I forgot.

We had one of those amazing rehearsals of Asmir’s play when everything was awesome and meaningful and you felt like a real artist. Afterward we went out to celebrate, lugging that huge wooden frame. We walked to Café Galerija but, as none of us had any money, ended up in the park, on a bench, leaning the frame on a nearby poplar. We watched people go by, scared people, miserable people, masks of suffering on stick figures. No one was fat. Everybody was aware. Even old people had a bounce in their step, knowing what war could bring at any point. It looked grotesque, unnatural. If it were on TV it would pain you to see it.

It was like we were driven to put that frame in front of us. To make a difference on those people’s faces, you know. Something. We let it sit in our laps, held it erect, and ceased all movement. We became a painting, staring out through the frame into the real world. And soon the real people stopped to stare at us, the painting,
forgetting for a moment about the war, the oppressive psychosis that permeated everything. People have to look at art no matter what.

A bunch of children swarmed around us trying to catch a facial twitch and laughed giddily, waved their little hands in front of our eyes, and scratched their little heads when we wouldn’t blink. Adults mostly stared from a distance, wondering why anybody would do this. Two elderly men with their hands behind their backs looked at us with brutal disgust, shaking their heads like the end of the world was coming and we were somehow responsible. And it would all have been an exercise in craft, a spur-of-the-moment performance-art piece, something nobody would remember for long, had it not started shelling and had we not, in our madness, remained motionless in spite of it, among the mad-dashing citizens.

(. . . anatomy of a flashback . . .)
*

In May of 1999, right around the time I was supposed to fly to Bosnia, I found myself in the parking lot of a Ralphs in Moorpark, California. Eric had dropped me off too early because he had to go to work, and I was killing time before my train to San Diego. Melissa had moved down there earlier that year, and my ability to bear things had been decreasing each day without her. I was living from weekend to weekend when I could go visit her or when she would come to me. I would breathe in with sadness on Sunday night and exhale with joy on Friday afternoon, both in her arms. While holding my breath, I fought off my brain by stuffing myself with words people wrote, beverages people distilled, and sleeping pills people manufactured.

The flashback started earlier at the station with the sudden roar of a freight train going by. The sound pierced me. I fell to the ground. For a moment it was happening right there. I didn’t go back to Bosnia this time. The war had come to me. An explosion rocked the walled-off neighborhood beyond the station’s parking lot.
I felt an onrush of warm air in my face. Debris sprayed everywhere, clanging into parked cars. A palm tree toppled over onto a green Chrysler. A Mexican kid fell off his bike, smoke devouring the cul-de-sac behind him . . . then it was blue sky, and cars wavering in the heat, and the Mexican kid contentedly riding in a loop, and the train disappearing toward Simi Valley, and nothing was happening, absolutely nothing was going on.

I started walking toward the Ralphs shopping plaza a little way down the street. I shook off unwanted thoughts and focused on my sneakers stepping ahead of me, carrying me forward. I enjoyed the flatness of the asphalt against the bottoms of my feet and imagined the inner workings of my ankle during the action of walking. All the pushes and pulls, pressures and releases. The mechanism. But the thoughts started to advance again (I heard them buzzing, then murmuring in my head) and in panic I tried to remember where I’d bought those sneakers, and when I remembered that, how much they’d cost, and when I remembered that, too, which one had I put on first this morning, which was an easy one since I’m a creature of habit, and fuck there was a child’s foot, lying sideways against the curb, a trickle of gentle blood behind it, smudgy torn-up sock with the Adidas logo caving inward where the child’s ankle used to be, its mechanism no longer intact, and my heart played a drum solo devoid of beat, just endless rolls, from snare drum to timpani, from timpani back to snare drum, an occasional chilling cymbal, and a sinister, frantic bass drum so reminiscent of mortar fire.

Bosnia materialized around me and I hit the ground. Shut my eyes. Covered my head. Prayed. Hard.

A bag lady brought me back.

“Wake up!” she screamed. “I ain’t getting off at Solana Beach until I know for sure all my shit is off this motherfucker!”

There was a flesh-colored hearing aid inserted in her ear like a piece of dough. I thought,
Do deaf schizophrenics still hear voices?

She rolled her shopping cart delicately, avoiding the potholes, aristocratic in her posture.

“You’re too much in your head, cracker!”

If you only knew,
I thought.

*
This piece was written on two napkins bearing the logo of a Café Leonardo in Tuzla and was found stuck in the diary that Ismet Prci
; was keeping in 1999 when he was visiting his mother.