Shards: A Novel (4 page)

My mother allowed me one piece of bread a meal, a heartbreaking decision for her that probably saved me from childhood obesity, considering my appetite back then. I was never permitted an allowance either. Every time someone would slip me a coin at a family gathering my mother would bring out my kitty bank and make me put it in there. Tough love and all, though, at the time, I just thought she was mean. She took my weight gain seriously, unlike the rest of my extended family, who joked about it and piled macaroni on my plate whenever my mother was out of the room. They called me
poguzija
—an endearing, domestic way of branding someone a fat-ass.

Stop eating,
my paternal grandma would say,
or your ass will climb on the back of your neck.

My mother encouraged me to go out and play, made me. I would do so begrudgingly, and instead of running after a soccer ball or climbing a tree I would stake out the ice-cream vendor in our building. The sight of people buying ice cream, pulling their tongues around and over it, savoring its frosty succulence, never failed to
give me a boner of a sweet tooth. Soon enough my eyes would fire up with ravenous gleam, and I would abandon my stakeout position to circle the shop like a shark around a scuba man in an underwater cage—a trancelike state.

Then one day I was awakened from my daze by the vendor. I don’t know how long I had loitered in front of the shop, scaring away the customers with my tongue dragging on the smoldering pavement and my eyes feverish with that outlandish, insatiable need. It was as if the world suddenly came into stark focus and I saw him poke his head out of the door and motion me over, his mustache twitching up and down like Chaplin’s. My legs took me there, closer to him, though my mind bellowed for them to stop, to quit, to turn away and run.

I knew he was giving me that free ice cream to get rid of me, out of pity. To him I was a poor child salivating over something I couldn’t afford. And it was true; I couldn’t afford my ass climbing up my spine to sit on the back of my neck, the cruel teasing and pinches, girls snickering during recess. I knew I shouldn’t take anything from strangers, and, of course, there was also the question of dignity. But despite all that my hand rose, and a chocolate-vanilla ice cream exchanged hands, and it was on my tongue and down my throat so fast that I blushed. I stood there staring at this man from Kosovo with his knobby chair-leg arms, muttered guiltily my feeble thanks—more habitually than expressing my real gratitude, which was bittersweet at best—and walked away.

I never went by that place ever again on account of shame. If I had to go past it I walked in step with an adult passerby, keeping my gaze locked ahead of me and fighting off all sorts of discomfort.

That charity ice cream didn’t sit well and I ended up spewing under some stairs.

AGE TWELVE

In elementary school I was into math. I liked that there was only one solution per problem, that nothing was vague and that you didn’t have to interpret what the author meant by this or that. I had it all figured out for the first four years.

It was later, as the math got more abstract and elusive and you had to remember formulas and draw coordinate systems and such, that I developed animosity toward the subject. Suddenly there was more than one solution to a single problem and I started to lose my footing in reality as I knew it. I remember being obsessed with the notion that a straight line can go on forever and never touch another straight line that was parallel to it, that, seen from the side, a straight line is just a dot, which I thought could not be proven, since the line would go right through your eye and brain, rendering you blind and dead. Tragically, I said this out loud in class and my comrade-teacher thought I was trying to be funny and made me stand in the corner facing the wall for hours. My peers snickered at the size of my ass, and I visualized myself turning into a dust mote and wafting out through the crack under the door.

But mostly my change of heart came when
she
walked into my life, my comrade-teacher Radmila. She was a plump brunette in her forties, with pleasant features and nicely manicured nails but with some kind of growth on her cheek that allowed her to smile only with one side of her mouth, making the effort seem cold and halfhearted. She was capable of such astonishing mercilessness that I pissed myself twenty minutes into a class because she wouldn’t let me out, because
that’s why we have breaks in between classes
. I sat there in lukewarm dampness, inside an acrid cloud, thinking of comic book heroes.

I stopped doing my homework. I convinced myself I couldn’t get it. I faked being sick to cut class. I prayed not to be called on. I copied other students’ work.

By the third trimester I had accumulated a plethora of bad grades, got caught cheating on an exam (little pieces of paper with formulas glued to the underside of my fat ruler), and was sent to the principal’s office. The principal, whom we called Rooster because he had a piece of loose, leathery skin connecting the tip of his chin to the center of his collarbone, ripped me a new one and then gave me a second chance. If I did well on my final exam he was going to let my
conduct unbecoming a student
slide.

There was no way I could have prepared a school year’s worth of math in two and a half weeks. I told myself that I was trying. In reality, most of my energy was directed at conjuring up an elaborate scheme that would excuse me from taking the final. I fantasized about being hit by a car and lingering between life and death. I prayed for a communicable disease.

It just so happened that my mother had to go with her nurses’ club to a symposium on how to battle alcoholism somewhere in Macedonia right about the time I was to take my final exam. Knowing this ahead of time and realizing that I was going to be alone with my pushover of a father, I hatched my master plan.

See, a couple of years back my cousin Adi had an inflamed appendix that needed to be taken out. Due to the operation and some complications, he didn’t have to take any final exams and still passed into the next year. My plan was to find out from him all the symptoms of an appendix attack and act them out for my father in hopes it would get me under the surgical knife. In the dictionary it said that the appendix is a slender, closed tube attached to the large intestine near the point at which it joins the small intestine. I had no problem sacrificing that.

Not only did my father buy into my performance but so did the doctors in the ER. I went out of my way not to blurt out the list of symptoms like an amateur. I just picked a few good ones and mentioned them offhandedly. There was no empty doubling over or cries of pain. I kept my cool.

It worked. By the time they got me into one of those surgery slip-ons and led me down the tiled floors of pacifying mint green and bleach, I did get cold feet but it was too late. The anesthesiologist started telling me a joke and zonked me out just before the punch line. When I tell this story I often exaggerate and say that my last thought as I was going under was
Motherfucker!
Like I said, an exaggeration.

I dreamed that my inflatable raft got ruptured on some craggy rocks just under the surface and that I was about to sink into the depths where some dark shapes were sliding around.

I came to in a corridor with terrible pain and a confusion of squeaky wheels and people talking and bleach and iodine. I was wheeled into a room, moved to a bed, and the boy next to me had some complications, so they left him open with a tube dripping yellow pus into a plastic container. He looked miserable. The girl on the other side of my bed was bald. She had lice, among other things.

I remember the ravenous sounds my stomach made when they brought in food for everyone but me and the pus boy. I remember his haircut—a little like Hitler’s—and the way the liquid glucose dripped down the tube and into my vein for lunch. My mom returned from Macedonia early and pulled some nurse strings to come and visit me beyond the visitation hours. She seemed to have bought my performance as well.

She was there when my doctor came into the room looking more like a butcher than a doctor, with oily skin a-sheen, an unshaven neck, and a mustache as solid as a chocolate log. He told us that I
was a very lucky boy, that if I hadn’t gotten to the hospital when I did I would have died, that the inflammation of the appendix was at such a late stage that it was full of pus and ready to burst. He then produced a jar of yellowish liquid with what looked like a fat piece of decomposing red licorice, twisted and curled.

The biggest one I have ever seen,
he said.
That’s including the grown-ups.

Let me get one thing across: I never, not for a single second during my performance, felt any pain. None. So what happened? Here are some possibilities. Perhaps the doctor found a perfectly normal appendix and realized I was lying and decided to play a little joke on me. Or perhaps I got so far into the role of a boy who’s having an appendix attack that I psychosomatically caused my appendix to inflame. Or maybe God found a twisted way to tell me I needed an operation when my body refused to warn me the usual way.

So what happened?

A realization:
There
is
no one solution. Everything’s up for interpretation. It’s all about what the author meant by this or that.

My mom made me go to school after missing only six days. I took the final exam. Got a C.

*
Yugoslav “benevolent” Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito died in Ljubljana’s Clinical Center on May 4, 1980, three days before his eighty-eighth birthday.

(. . . germs . . .)

Mustafa was crawling around the apartment pretending to be a scuba diver, like one he saw on
Survival
. He had on a pair of welding goggles and a red thermos bottle taped to the back of his shirt as a makeshift oxygen tank. In his hand he brandished a straightedge, his harpoon gun, which he fired at things around the apartment, emitting slow, guttural sounds of underwater battles with sea monsters.

Chasing a particularly nasty and elusive hammerhead, Mustafa rolled into the hall when he heard them talking about germs in the living room. His mother had a guest and he was told not to disturb them. His mother’s friend from work, the doctor who talked weird, was over for a cup of coffee. He had given Mustafa a chocolate earlier, which Mustafa had devoured in three, enormous mouthfuls. He could see him now sitting on the sofa, holding his eyeglasses by their rims and sucking on one of the plastic tips meaningfully.

“Children of physicians often suffer from verminophobia,” the doctor said.

“Is that what it’s called?” his mother asked. From where he was lying, Mustafa could see only her bare foot lightly bouncing under the coffee table. It bounced sporadically against
the doctor’s shin until the doctor moved it closer so the foot rested against him and the bouncing stopped altogether.

“Verminophobia is an unwarranted fear of germs, yes.”

Mustafa didn’t believe in germs. The smallest thing he ever saw was a grain of sand on a napkin, and he didn’t see anything on it resembling the multilimbed creatures whose photographs his mother pointed out in one of her books. He thought if they existed, they existed somewhere else, in the dirt or in the muddy water, in pond scum, but not here in the apartment. Otherwise he would have seen one by now, especially crawling around on his belly.

The pressure cooker hissed like a train and his mother jumped and ran to the kitchen, apologizing all the way. The doctor pulled out a kerchief from his pocket and started to clean the lenses on his glasses when he noticed Mustafa lying there in the hall. He smiled and motioned him over.

“Gentlemen do not eavesdrop on other people’s conversations,” the doctor said.

“I’m not a gentleman, I’m a scuba diver.” Mustafa stood up.

The man laughed.

“That is quite humorous, Mr. Scuba Diver,” he said and put his glasses back on. Mustafa, on the other hand, took off his goggles because they were beginning to fog up, inverted them, and let them rest against his forehead, still attached to his skull by their elastic band. He squinted at the doctor:

“Can I ask you a question?”

“May I ask you a question.”

“May I ask you a question?”

“Always, son.”

“Is it possible to die from germanophobia?”

“Do you mean verminophobia?”

“When people are scared of germs.” Mustafa said
germs
with skepticism and disdain.

“I’ll tell you a story if you promise not to tell your mother that I’ve told you it.”

“I promise.”

“A certain physician from Tuzla would wear surgical gloves at the dinner table. If he dropped a pen on the floor in his own house, he would put on gloves, pick it up, dispose of it, remove the gloves, wash his hands, and open a new package of pens. Once, in the winter, his car wouldn’t start, so he had to take public transportation to work. The bus was full and he had to stand. The driver pressed the gas pedal a little too eagerly, the vehicle jerked forward and the physician from Tuzla lost his balance, fell headfirst into the edge of a seat, cracked his skull badly, and later died in the hospital from head trauma. He refused to hold on to the rail for fear of it being contaminated by who knows what kind of germs. That physician . . . that was my brother.”

“Is that a yes, then?”

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from October/November 1998

The other day I was in the cafeteria at school and out of nowhere I thought there was shelling. They were shelling Moorpark College. I dove for nothing.

How is it that some shell that exploded long ago in Tuzla can reassemble itself, fly backward into the mouth of the mortar that shot it, get shot again, and reach me here at the Moorpark College cafeteria? How is it that I can exist in both the past and the present simultaneously, be both body and soul simultaneously, live both reality and fantasy simultaneously? How is it that the smallest units of light can be both waves and particles simultaneously, depending on how you look at them? Where’s the logic? Where’s the sound mind? How am I to interpret?

Mati
, you’d kill me, but I drink. You have no idea how I drink!

I have a gun,
mati
, a lady pistol made of chrome and steel. I stole it from someone’s bedroom, from underneath their leopard-patterned pillow covered with dandruff, at a Halloween party last year. I was Pinhead from the Ramones song. I keep the gun hidden in my book-shelf,
right behind the complete Mayakovsky, wrapped up in a rag. Eric doesn’t know. There are bullets in it, six of them, but only the first one matters, right? I’m sorry I’m so much like you in this respect.

In what way am I like my father? Sense of humor? Ability to turn off the outside world? In what way,
mati
?

I love a girl. Melissa. Her hair oozes like honey. It’s orange in the sun. She loves me,
mati
. She’s American. She goes to church. She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage. She volunteers. She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they’re done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme. She’s sharp. She drives like a lunatic. She’s capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.

I
don’t
miss home,
mati
. I’m there all the time. In the past. In fiction.