Shards: A Novel (41 page)

But in the letter’s salutation, the Claw had, for some reason, blacked out the name to which the letter was addressed and written Mustafa above it in a surprisingly bubbly longhand. When Mustafa later read over it he realized that he was right, that that woman was crazy and the letter had been addressed to someone else, not him. Looking at the paper all he could discern under that uneven rectangle of black ink was the first letter of the first name in the salutation, which looked like an
L
or perhaps an
I
. It was like reading a government-censored document; it was impossible to be 100 percent certain.

NOTEBOOK THREE:

BOOM-BOOM
*

*
The San Diego Police Department found the third notebook, titled “BOOM-BOOM,” in Izzy’s car, which was parked on La Jolla Shores near the university, some three hundred pages of it. In the notebook was the following note: “
I, Ismet Prci
, the author and the characters of these chicken scratches, residing in a silver 1981 VW Scirocco with licence plate #_____, generally located around San Diego County, being of (finally) sound mind, do hereby declare this instrument to be the last will and testament of my life. However, I do not hereby revoke any previous chicken scratches and codicils. I direct that the disposition of my remains be as follows: Burn me until none of me is left. I give all the rest and residue of my estate to Eric Carlson of ____ Los Feliz Drive, Thousand Oaks, CA 91362, to do with as he pleases, should he survive me for sixty days. The only condition is that he read all of this and try to piece me together.”
Bound as I am by this last will and testament, I’m including a portion of this notebook here.

(. . . the absurdity of reality,
the mind-boggling, fucking
unlikeliness of it all . . .)

. . . It came to me, Eric. It came to me in a dream. I finally understand EVERYTHING! Listen:

In the beginning there was Light. In the beginning there was the Word. In the beginning there was the Voice. In the beginning there was the Voice using Words to bring the Light into existence by uttering the word Light into the void. Thus, out of the void came the light and from it everything else. But if something can be created out of nothing then something and nothing are made out of the same material, so to speak. If something can be created out of nothing by the sheer utterance of sound that gives meaning to it, then the only difference between something and nothing is in the naming. By calling nothing something, nothing becomes something, but the truth remains that nothing really changes in the great scheme of things. The physical constitution of nothing/ something, if it can even be called that, remains the same.

That means that heaven = hell = purgatory = void = return to God. Eternal life = death forever. Mahatma Gandhi = Adolf
Hitler. Al-Qaeda = UNICEF. Good and bad are indistinguishable. 0=1=2=3= . . . =forever.

Nothing is everything because there isn’t anything.

Now, the sad thing is that some pieces of this nothing thought themselves up, imagined themselves up, then thought up and imagined and created this thing called
reality
. These little nothings got very caught up in all this
reality
they invented, and made it very complex and cyclical, so much so that it made them forget that they were really, in essence, still nothing. It made them stupid. It made them real.

We are the descendents of these stupid, real people who forgot that they were nothing. So we go on epic journeys, from nothing to nothing, we start in nothing and end up in nothing, we never leave nothing, but we perpetuate our delusions. On some level we know we’re nothing but we’re too scared to think about that. The whole time we’re making this journey from nothing to nothing, we sense, we hope, that there is someone, something out there, a
third presence
that follows us, watches over us, narrates us, dreams us into being, and we hope that this being means something, is something. What is this something we hope is out there?

1. Fill in the blank:

The third presence is _____________?

a. God

b. The narrator

c. Ismet

d. Mustafa

e. What?

f. Me

g. You

h. Who gives a shit?

i. Something

j. Nothing

k. All of the above

l. None of the above

m. All/none of the above

If you answered “m. All/none of the above,” you are on your way to become nothing.

(. . . monologue . . .)
*

. . . back at the house out of habit, to sneak in a shower when you know your ex-roommates aren’t home, even though you don’t live there anymore, even though your old room is now an office and your old closet is full of Ben’s outrigger paddles and moldy wet suits, and even though Jen said she would call the police if you used the washer and dryer, on the patio again you find the spare key under the terra-cotta Santa Claus underneath the fig tree and go in, strip out of your clothes, and use their soap and shampoo and a towel . . .

. . . although the love is gone, although she left sometime ago and moved away and took the computer and the bed and the jar of change and left you red hair in the lining of your sweatshirts and on your pillowcase and that scent in your nostrils and in your brain, since you can smell it even out at the beach where the cold winds blow . . .

. . . and although your mother longs to die back in Bosnia, where your father got up one morning and found her naked in the bathtub with her wrists slit the longitudinal way this time, with her stomach full of Valium and Ativan and aspirin and slivovitz, with her head
full of thick blissful nothing,
but still alive,
and instead of calling for an ambulance, hauled her out of the tub, dried her body with the floor mat and some towels, put a pair of panties and a slip-on nighty on her, dragged her across the parquet and into the bedroom, where he hadn’t noticed her not being all night, lifted her onto her side of the bed, started a load of pink-stained laundry, and slipped out of the house so as not to wake your brother, knowing this depressed young man would not get up before two in the afternoon, because he never does, and went to work as usual, hoping she would finish dying, finish killing herself for once, but was really disappointed when your brother called him in a panic, and after she came out of a three-day coma, bought her an apartment on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper, the same one you saw a woman jump from when you were a toddler, and told her he couldn’t handle the stress of being near her anymore and that they should separate, still denying his involvement with those other women, which brought your mother within an inch of her life in the first place, still denying he left her on her side of the bed to die . . .

. . . despite the fact that because of all of this your chest most of the time feels inflated with . . . full of what? wrongness? full of whatever the fuck is left in the wake of a lot of love, full of whatever the fuck love turns into when you figure out its insignificance, when you figure out you can’t hold on to the loved ones, you can’t help the loved ones, you don’t know the loved ones, and you want to claw at your chest, stab your fingers through your own breastplate, and pull apart your rib cage like an accordion, the way Superman pulls apart Clark Kent’s suit to get all that love out, all that wrongness out, all that pain, and although this is how bad things are all the time, this day of all days you feel fine . . .

. . . you feel better because your ex-roommates are gone until tomorrow (you checked on their crew’s Web site at the library:
Kae Elua: two-day race in Catalina) and this means you will sleep in their bed, use their computer, and play video games, so you put on some clean clothes and run to the kitchen and make yourself a huge Travesty with their vodka first, then shake some dry food into Johnny Cat’s bowl, and you hear him thump down onto the carpet somewhere in the back of the house and then in a flash he’s there crunching away at the food, loveless and yellow-eyed, and driven crazy by some kind of skin disease that makes him chew his own ass, and you make your way into the office, turn on a video game, a first-person shooter, and choose to become a SWAT commander and lead a band of artificially intelligent police officers into a bank under siege and save three blonde bank employees from masked terrorists who are holding them hostage . . .

. . . your mission is to save and you have to find your way through the maze of offices and corridors adorned with potted palm trees, water coolers, vent systems, and you find and save two of the three employees but the third one is nowhere to be found, and you kill all the enemies and run around the repetitive gamescapes trying to find her but can’t, you can’t advance to the next level if you don’t save all three, so you kill all the enemies and, out of boredom, kill your fellow squad mates, too, but they keep respawning and you keep on killing them, running out of ammo, picking up their weapons and using them on them . . .

. . . and then you find her and when you do you realize there’s a glitch in the game’s design, because she’s stuck in a wall and you can’t get her to come with you, because you can’t click on her because she’s in the wall . . .

. . . and you realize there is stuff on your real face, your face is wet and you cannot breathe through your nose from all the stuff in there and what is the point of saving anything anyway and you get up and go for more alcohol, blowing your nose into your sleeve, but
instead pick up the phone and dial your mother’s seventeenth-floor apartment and listen to it ring and ring in Bosnia, expecting her weak hello to crush you, break you, but it just rings and rings and the hum of the silences becomes louder than the electronic
toooots
and then a taped voice says,
Sorry, no one is home, please try your call later,
and you panic and dial again and suffer through this whole thing again and again, each time a little more because a part of your mind is screaming
WAKE UP,
part of it is praying, part of it is coolly observing
She’s dead,
part of it is negating it,
She’s not dead,
and you hang up and call your father’s number for the first time in months, that fucker’s number, and your brother answers, sounding sleepy:

— What do you want?

— Where is Mother?

— How the hell should I know? At her place?

— Shouldn’t you?

— Whatever.

— Where’s
he
?

— Sleeping.

— I wanna talk to him.

— He’s in there with some slut. I’m not going in there.

— You need to go over to Mother’s apartment right now and check on her.

— Do you know what time it is?

— She’s not answering her phone, you fucker.

— Maybe she took a sleeping pill. Maybe she’s visiting a friend. Maybe—

— You fucker! You fucker!

— She’s taking a walk. Maybe she pulled the phone out of the wall.

— Maybe she’s fuckin’ dead, fucker? Maybe you two finally pushed her over the edge.

— Why don’t
you
fly out here and
you
check on her? It all started with
you
leaving, fucker. Remember that? All of this.
You
should be over here, fucker.
You
should be here feeling this. Fucker . .

. . . and the line goes dead and you throw the cordless phone into the butcher block, where it breaks into pieces, and you grab the bottle of vodka out of the pantry and chug until you can’t think anymore, don’t understand why you’re in tears anymore . . .

. . . morning takes care of itself, chases away the other life, the Apache battle cries and visions of moving sneakers, and even though your jaw dully throbs and it’s hard for you to swallow you go out to your car and grab all the clothes you can and start a load of laundry, then ransack the house for food and money. You try your mother but no one answers. You call your father. Mehmed hangs up on you before you can say hello. You drink the rest of the vodka and watch Judge Judy yell at people until the washer is done washing and the dryer is done drying.

You realize you forgot to turn off the video game and when you go into the office the bank teller is still running in the wall and your fellow SWAT people have respawned and are going through the motions of looking, covering one another, running to and from the truck, swarming around the woman in the wall whom they can never help, never reach, and you finally understand how absurd, impossible, stupid, shitty, everything is.

*
In the margins of these fragments the following note appeared: “PRESTO! STACCATO! Perform almost breathlessly!”

(. . . boom-boom . . .)
*

Once upon a time there was a . . . Once upon a time there is a . . . prison. A human convict has transgressed against the human society and was put here. Here he has transgressed against the ego of a
BOOM!
particular guard and for this transgression he is being led down a cavernous black corridor toward the
holes
. His punishment: forty days of solitary confinement. He has heard stories about the
holes,
how they dematerialize reality and materialize nothingness. How the particular kind of darkness in the
holes
can short-circuit the mind. The convict knows all of this, and so, as soon as the key is turned in the lock behind him and he gets the first glimpse of that annihilating darkness and its power, he reaches for a
BOOM!
button. He first touches his throat knowing that’s where the collar of his prison uniform will be. He investigates in the general area there until he finds the collar and finds the button there, that one button he never uses anyway, because his uniform is too small and buttoning it, even if possible, would seriously hinder his breathing. He finds it, gets a good grip on it, and pulls it off. Th
BOOM!
e string holding the button in place snaps and suddenly it is in
between his fingers, away from the collar, the button. It is round shaped, he feels, because of the way its edges bite into the flesh of his fingertips. It’s metal. It’s flat when he holds it the other way but his skin detects an unevenness and his mind tells him that it’s probably leftover string, so he pulls at it with his nails and sure enough little pieces of string that held the button in its place on the collar are loose between his fingers. He rolls them into a ball and lets it silently fall to the concrete beneath him. It’s of no importance to him because it’s too small. But the button. The button is just the right size. Not too big, not too small. He then extends both of his arms out away from himself in all four major directions and finds out that, standing where he’s standing, he can touch the cell wall to his right and in front of him. His mind does a quick calculation and he makes
BOOM!
a small diagonal step to the left and back and repeats the arms-extending-in-four-major-directions routine to find that he cannot touch any of the walls now. This is when he starts to spin in his place in the middle of the
hole,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times, and on the tenth time he tosses the button over his left shoulder and listens to it
plink
,
plink, plinkety
-
plink
,
plink, plink
on the concrete until all is silent. Then he goes down on all fours and begins his search for the button. He crawls around for as long as it takes until he stumbles upon it in the dark, picks it up, feels its edges bite into the flesh of his fingertips in that round familiar way, stands up, extends his arms in all four major directions, finds that he can touch the wall behind him now, does a quick calculation and takes a step forward, repeats the armextended- in-all-four-major-directions routine until he finds himself in the middle of the
hole,
spins around one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times and then tosses the button over his right shoulder and listens to it
plink, plink, plinkety-plink, plink, plink
on the concrete until there’s a silence,
BOOM!
goes down on
his hands and knees and begins the search anew, and repeats this over and over for forty days. He does this because he knows that if he is to stay himself he needs to keep his mind busy and on-task. He knows he needs to do this because otherwise he is running the risk of losing it, short-circuiting it, the mind. He knows that in the midst of nothing in the middle of the hole, he needs to pretend that there’s something, this task of finding the button over and over, or telling himself a story over and over, to keep the mind busy so it doesn’t short-circuit itself but
BOOM!
I can’t do it. I can’t keep telling myself this story because the
BOOM!
shells are hitting closer and closer and the mint green hospital room is vibrating, the beams are creaking, the ceiling is flaking and falling down on me like plum blossoms, and at the same time, somehow, I’m up here staring down, down, and the firmament is melting into a California rain and my heart is climbing up my esophagus and into my throat, into my eye sockets, into my thoughts, pounding there,
BOOM!
as I wish I were in prison right now, in a
hole,
in the middle of it, on my hands and knees searching for a b
BOOM!
utton instead of suffering this pounding, the pounding of shells on this fucking hospital, this pounding rain, this pounding in my head, the pounding of memory, of bullets and tree limbs, the pounding of Mother, the pounding of red hair, the pounding of volatile muscles turning rigid in the fleeting world far below, down there, where into my (pounding) ephemeral ear the sidewalk shall whisper the truth
BOOM!.

In the Name of God, the most Gracious, the most Merciful.

Dear son,

Where are you? Are you alive?

I’m writing this even though I don’t know these things. I’m writing this because I have to, because I have to tell you something that I cannot, that I never could, not even to myself. But it’s killing me.

Everybody says you’re dead. People I haven’t heard from in years call and offer condolences, send food, money, say,
If you need anything.

I donate what they send. I don’t believe them. I know you’re alive. I just know.

Americans sent me pictures of a body to identify. Porridge of meat and guts, shards of bone. They said you jumped off a building, killed yourself. They said they had partial fingerprints. But it wasn’t you, was it? They couldn’t find your appendectomy scar. Weren’t sure. They couldn’t find the birthmark below your knee.
Inconclusive,
they said. The body’s head had good hair like yours but it was too gray for you. One can’t go gray overnight, can one? They say it’s possible but I don’t believe it. How can I?

Your . . . father is the one who signed the affidavit of identification or whatever and got everybody believing in this nonsense.
Face the facts,
he said when I called to beg him not to do it. He’s quick to wash his hands of people that way. He tried to wash his hands of me, too, but I’m still alive, right? That’s the last and only time I spoke to him.

* * *

Right now I tried to write the impossible (truth) to you, what I can’t tell myself, and couldn’t. What a surprise. But I tried really hard, son. People are not saints. Some things can only be admitted to in person. There’ll be time for that, God willing.

But at least I can tell you the news. Your brother moved to Sarajevo to go to the university down there and to get away from your father. They were fighting something awful, I heard. He’s studying pharmacology and dating a girl he won’t let me meet. He’s either ashamed that I’m religious or that I’m crazy, or both. He calls once a month or so.

Asmir made a documentary film in Scotland about your guys’ troupe and it played twice on national TV. Mehmed taped it for me. I watch it every day, so much that the parts you’re in are getting worn and the images dance up and down. Asmir came to visit in August and brought me tulips and bonbons and cried for you a little. Gave me a disc of the film but I still don’t have that player thingy. He said that Bokal married a woman twenty years his senior to stay legal in England. Also, he said that your friend Omar was in rehab for an overdose but that he’s better now. He didn’t know where Ramona was because they had a falling out.

Your friend Eric from America sent me a letter and a book by Faulkner, but I can’t read either, as you know. We learned Russian in school. There was a picture, too. He has the cutest little blond boy and his wife looks strong and sturdy, which is good for women in that crazy America. They are all smiling—you know how Americans are in front of a camera.

Oh, I almost forgot. Do you know someone named Mustafa Nalic?;

He writes that he knows you but I don’t remember him. I’ve yet to meet him in person. He’s more like an angel to me, invisible but
good. He takes care of me. Every month he sends this kid to my door with all my medications and some money, too. He sent me a
kurban
for Bajram, nearly half a lamb. (I made some of it with okra, the way you like it. I froze most of it so you can try it when you come home.) He seems to think that he owes me. He sent me this note and thanked me for visiting him in the hospital. It says that I was the only one who ministered to him during the war when he was wounded when a tree fell on his neck, although I don’t recall doing any of it. But, with my head, who knows.

Where are you, my son?

I feel you. I know you’re out there somewhere.

Why don’t you call me?

Call me when you get this.

Or just come back to me. I have lamb and okra waiting for you.

And sauerkraut. Who’s gonna eat all this food?
I
can’t do it alone.

I miss you like I would miss a limb.

I need to tell you what I cannot write here.

I’m alone. In the walls.

In God.

Waiting.

*
This is the final entry and it appears here exactly as it does in the original without any of my meddling. Bear with it.