Brass Read online

  Before you know it you’ve accumulated more than you can comfortably hold in your hands, but what’s that word your English teacher used once or twice? Serendipity! There’s an abandoned cart with a brand-new litter box and the wadded-up paper from some breakfast sandwich waiting for you in the next aisle over. You drop your stuff in the carriage and pull out the litter box and the paper, but then you think that you might like to get a cat to keep you company in Texas, so back in the cart the litter box goes. The cat will be gray and white and named Bojangles after the breakfast sandwich wrapper, and Bo is going to need some kibble and a soft bed to sleep on, so off you go to fulfill his needs and then some, the spoiled little bastard he’ll be.

  By the time you feel the tap on your shoulder, you have an apartment for you and Bo fully furnished, and when you see Ahmet you think, Shit, don’t tell me that I’m supposed to include him, too.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  You look down at the cart and shrug. It’s so obvious what you’re doing that you don’t feel the need to answer, but then again, it’s impolite to condescend, and you’re trying to turn over a new leaf. “Shopping,” you answer.

  He scans the stuff in the carriage, and by the way his lip curls over his tooth—just that one sharp canine tooth that sits too high in his gums, so it looks like it belongs in someone else’s mouth—you know he’s not happy about something, maybe the color of the cereal bowls you picked out. They’re eggshell blue, delicate-looking but indestructible, more than sturdy enough to handle the Frosted Mini-Wheats you’d picked up in the cereal aisle, along with a couple boxes of Count Chocula for treat time.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asks.

  “I need some stuff for Texas,” you say.

  “A litter box? A Brita filter?”

  You’re beginning to take offense. A minute before they seemed like nice things to have, but he’s making you doubt your taste.

  “You’re kidding. You’re kidding me, right? This isn’t your carriage.”

  Is it your carriage? Suddenly it doesn’t look all that familiar. Eggshell-blue bowls? The real Luljeta would have chosen bone. Luljeta would have chosen Shower Fresh deodorant over Mountain Fresh.

  “This is a joke. You’re just playing with me, right?” he asks.

  You shake your head. He’s right, this isn’t your carriage. You are just playing with him.

  “You did not just go crazy, right?”

  “No,” you say.

  “You’re not crazy. This stuff isn’t yours.”

  “I’m tired,” you say. “I am really tired.”

  He turns around and begins walking away. “Let’s go,” he says, and though that doesn’t sound like the best idea you’d ever heard, it’s better than anything you can come up with at the moment.

  On the way back to the car, the woman from the minivan stares at you, her gloved right hand holding a cigarette and her left cocked up on her hip. You’re pretty sure she smiles at you, and so you smile back. It’s the least you could do for each other, these little acts of kindness in these little blacktop moments.

  —

  You were never a good sleeper. You’d stopped crying through the night at only a few months old, but that didn’t mean that you slept through it. When you first learned to stand, you would immediately rise to your feet when your mother put you in the crib, your hands on the bars as if in a prison, and often she would wake to find you standing in the very same position. She wondered if you’d moved from that position at all during the night, if you’d forgiven her abandonment of you long enough to rest for even an hour, but mostly she was grateful to you for letting her sleep if you weren’t going to. Perhaps she should’ve been more concerned for your well-being than for her own, because she must have read somewhere that sleep was possibly more vital to the growing human body than food.

  She’d told you about your sleepless infant nights as if in apology for the sleepless teenage ones you frequently experience now. She told you that you can somewhat compensate for lost sleep with fifteen-minute power naps, according to Redbook or some other women’s mag that she browses through in the checkout line at the grocery store, but you suck at napping even more than at night sleep. Napping is the worst. It brings on the worst dreams, the sleep paralysis that you are not fully convinced comes from misfiring brain synapses instead of the paranormal, and so you avoid sleeping during the daytime when at all possible. Sometimes it isn’t possible, like in the passenger seat of a car after a night of so little rest that it almost doesn’t count as a night at all, when the long, tedious, rolling miles of I-20 have the effect of a narcotic. You feel yourself succumb and struggle to open your heavy eyelids, but when you do, you see cockroaches scurrying over the dashboard, clogging up the heater vents, a solid sheet of them, one throbbing red mass of cockroach. They drop under their own weight onto your feet and thighs, and you try to scream and flail but you’re frozen. All you can muster is a little closed-throat moan that doesn’t convey the terror you feel, that instead sounds like you smell something good in the oven, those crescent rolls from Christmas dinner.

  “Hey,” Ahmet says, shaking your forearm. “Are you all right? You’re making weird sounds.”

  Weird sounds. That’s the best you could do—it wasn’t the scream you thought you needed, but it worked. The cockroaches scatter back to the little dream nests where they sit it out while you’re awake. You blink your eyes a few times, then pry them open with your fingers.

  “Can we get some coffee?” you ask.

  “If we stop for coffee now we’re going to have to stop three more times in the next hour so you can pee,” he says.

  “I’ll get some adult diapers when we stop and just pee into those,” you say.

  “I wish you would do that,” he says.

  “I will,” you say. It scares you a little that you’re not really joking.

  “What do you need coffee for, anyway? You’re not even the one driving.”

  “I don’t want to keep falling asleep.”

  Ahmet is white-knuckling the wheel. He’s getting annoyed, and you don’t blame him. You’re still groggy, but conscious enough to realize how annoying you’re being, annoying enough that you don’t want to hear yourself talk, only you can’t seem to stop babbling about cockroaches and the various forms of truck stop caffeine. You suddenly understand completely why NYU doesn’t want you, and why your father didn’t, and why some people want to punch you in the mouth, which knows only two modes: silent and this nonsense.

  “You need sleep,” Ahmet says. “You said yourself how tired you are. You almost had a nervous breakdown in Walmart.”

  “I don’t want to sleep this kind of sleep. I’m having bad dreams.”

  “This whole thing is a bad dream,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I want to stop.”

  “Please just go to sleep.”

  “No, I want to stop. I don’t want to do this anymore,” you say. You didn’t expect those words to leave your mouth, but hearing them makes you feel like Einstein stumbling onto some new physics theorem, an answer to something that’s been sitting there all along, just waiting to be discovered. You want to stop. You want to stop! It sounds so perfect in your head that you repeat it again out loud. “I want to stop, Ahmet. Stop.”

  But Ahmet’s foot is getting heavier on the go pedal, not the stop one.

  “You don’t have to do this anymore, either. I don’t want you to do this for me.”

  “It’s a little late for that. We’re closer to Houston than to Waterbury.”

  “Just let me out,” you say.

  “Just calm down,” he answers.

  “I’m calm. Who’s not calm? I just don’t want to do this anymore.”

  He shakes his head in disbelief. You could have told him you were a genie and he wouldn’t have been more confused. You could have told him that you were pregnant with his child and he wouldn’t have been more disgusted.


  “And what do you want to do instead?” he asks.

  You shake your head.

  “What is even wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know,” you say. The question was meant to be hypothetical at best, insulting at worst, but you like the question. It makes you feel like some progress is being made: you both acknowledge that there’s something wrong with you, which is strangely reassuring.

  Ahmet doesn’t seem to take comfort in it. Even with his hands firmly gripping the wheel, you can see that he’s shaking, his Adam’s apple moving ever so slightly up and down as he swallows what might be sobs, at least if you’re willing to acknowledge that you could have caused another human being enough pain to cry. Sure, there’s power in that, in making someone cry, there’s that English-class agency word popping up in real-world practical applications again, and yet it doesn’t feel awesome like it had back in the assistant principal’s office, when it seemed like the key to forward momentum.

  “I’m sorry,” you say.

  “Your mother has no idea where you are, right?”

  “Can you please pull over? Will you please stop the car?”

  “You could just get up and leave? How do you do that? Don’t you have any feelings?”

  “I do,” you say. “I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up. Please pull over.”

  “Is that why you want to be with him? Because you’re just like him?”

  “Maybe,” you say. “I might be. I don’t know.”

  “It’s cruel. You have been just cruel,” he says, and he seems as confused by your cruelty as saddened by it. This boy refugee, who has seen neighbors kill neighbors, who had been born into a war and lost more than you had ever known by the time he had been potty-trained; this young handsome man, who has managed to find joy in Kawasakis and hope in Panera Bread; this person is confused and saddened by you, who, he is just realizing, has silently mocked him for his Kawasaki and Panera Bread, and used him not for his company but for his hatchback. He who had been born into cruelty and yet somehow had not been ruined by it, and in fact had rejected it so entirely that he didn’t even recognize it in you when he met you, is now reminded that he should have never let his guard down, not even with someone whose face is as pretty as yours.

  “There’s a rest stop at the next exit,” you say. “Please stop.”

  He does stop. He stops talking and, in half a mile, he stops the car. He stops looking at you quizzically when you grab your bag from the backseat, and when you come back to tell him that you’ll be hitching a ride with a silver-headed woman who found you crying so pathetically that she felt obligated to offer you a ride in her camper with her and her old man, he doesn’t try to talk you out of it. He tells you obligatorily that it’s a bad idea, hands you a pair of brass knuckles from his glove box, and tells you to text him if you change your mind, but you know that he hopes you won’t. You can see that he’s already rebuilding, heading east back to the home he hadn’t chosen but had enough sense to treasure.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Elsie

  I came home from work and went to collapse onto the air mattress and found instead an actual mattress with an actual box spring sitting on an actual metal bed frame. It wasn’t made up—that was women’s work—but the sheets were ready at the foot, and a new comforter was waiting to be plucked from its plastic sack and made to live up to its name. It did, briefly. It was such a beautiful innerspring-and-latex oasis that I didn’t care if it turned out to be some rent-to-own wonder that might be repoed in the middle of the night. I just enveloped the mattress in the scratchy sheets, pulled the blanket up to my chin, and let myself be comforted straight into a deep, deep sleep. I woke up because I was starving, and the hunger was infiltrating my dream, in which I was standing in line at a Chinese restaurant but never able to quite make it to the buffet. I cried and flailed, but I never got my hands on any of the crab rangoons I needed to stay alive.

  When I woke, Bashkim was looking at me like a prowler caught in the act.

  “Do you like the bed?” he asked.

  “It looks like I do,” I said. “What are you doing home?”

  He walked over and sat down by my feet, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to reach him with my fists in my condition. He was expecting a fit in response to whatever it was he was about to say, but that just went to show that he hadn’t been paying attention to me at all. I was past rage, or rather it was past me. I couldn’t even strive for rage anymore. I mostly got out of bed because I had to pee and also because, really, I had no other choice. There were mouths to be fed, time cards to be punched. Sitting upright was the goal.

  “You needed this. You should not be sleeping on the floor anymore.”

  “Mary slept on the floor.”

  “Who?”

  “The mother of Christ, our lord and savior.”

  Bashkim rubbed his temples. “You are not her.”

  “I know.”

  “Not even a little bit her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, I will be away for a little while.”

  There was no reason for him to flinch the way he did. I knew it was coming.

  “How long?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe two, three weeks.”

  I sank down deeper into the pillows. They were new, too, thick stuffed things that kept my neck at an unnatural angle. After all my lobbying and whining for a real mattress, the damn thing was harder on me than the floor was.

  “We haven’t decided on a name for the baby,” I said, some kind of halfhearted attempt at protest.

  “The baby is not here yet.”

  “Yeah, but you’re supposed to decide ahead of time.”

  Bashkim pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, looked at it and then at me, and put it away again. “I like Jak. J-A-K. It looks Albanian and American both.”

  “What do you like for a girl?”

  “I have not thought about for a girl.”

  “You should,” I said. “Just in case.”

  He might as well have been on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic already, as far away as he looked to me. He cracked his knuckles one by one, each of them at a slightly different pitch, as if someone were lightly tapping the toy xylophone in the baby’s room. “My mother was named Luljeta,” he said. “It is a nice name.”

  “Was she a good person?” I asked.

  “She lived through hell, and you could see it. But yes, she was a good person,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  “I will be back for the birth, though. Hold on as long as you can,” he said.

  I almost laughed at how naïve he sounded then, and I almost cried for the same reason, but instead I just closed my eyes and opened them only once more that night, when he woke me to tell me goodbye.

  He didn’t say goodbye, actually. What he said was “I’m sorry.” He grabbed my hand so tight it hurt and said it again. “I’m sorry. I am.”

  I’m the one who said goodbye.

  —

  The next time I got out of bed it wasn’t to pee or eat or get ready for work. I sleepwalked to the kitchen, but when I came to I knew exactly what I was looking for, just like I knew, before I even reached my hand into the empty tin, that Greta’s cash loan, that fat paper knot that represented every favor I had ever called in, every hope I dared still hope, was already gone, on its way to the Balkans, and that I was right there at the bottom of that pyramid scheme Dan Rather had talked about on the evening news.

  It was a lot of weight to support, and my legs shook until they gave way altogether.

  On the floor I wept, but it felt like a performance, like I thought someone was watching me and I had to grieve the right way or I’d fail that test, too. I understood, in theory, that my paddle was way, way down the shit stream, tumbling over a shit waterfall, caught up in a violent shit eddy. I understood, in theory, that the person I was planning to escape from had escaped me instead, just like Gret
a’s money had escaped me. Every promise I had made to her, every promise I had made to the kid, every promise I never even bothered to make in my head or aloud, were all broken before my water was. But it was all happening an hour before my alarm clock was set to go off, so I thought that maybe none of this actually counted, since the day’s sandglass hadn’t really been turned over yet. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I picked myself up and went back to bed. I told myself I’d come up with a plan later, later being that dangling carrot a few ticks ahead in time, that little future heaven where all my greatest plans are made and deployed.

  —

  A pain tore through my middle and I curled into myself and wriggled.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. I thought for a minute: My god, I’m in labor, but I remembered the British doctor who said that labor doesn’t hurt, fear does. I’d been afraid for months without ever feeling these kinds of spasms, so it had to be something else. The new mattress, I thought. Bashkim had bought one made of nails and they punctured my vertebrae as I slept. The alarm clock was still twenty minutes away from ringing, but I cursed it as if it was what had woken me instead of the pain. I could barely move. I needed some Advil desperately but we’d run out earlier that week, between my back pain and Bashkim’s endless headaches—headache, really, a singular one that stretched on forever. We still hadn’t fixed the phone that I’d ripped out, and it was too early to call anyone, and who would I call to run my errands for me anyway? Another spasm hit, and then I had to shit, too. The pain in my back had made me forget about the rest of my body, but eventually I recognized the familiar pressure on my lower gut. I thought that if I could just get myself to the bathroom and rid myself of it, I could flush the pain away, too. The pain wasn’t part of me, it was a phantasm and could be exorcised, I thought. It could be shat out.