You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [0]
YOU DESERVE NOTHING
Europa Editions
214 West 19th St.
New York NY 10011
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www.europaeditions.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Alexander Maksik
First publication 2011 by Europa Editions
An excerpt from this novel
was first published in Narrative magazine
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover illustration by Marina Sagona
ISBN 978-1-60945-912-3 (US)
ISBN 978-1-60945-910-9 (World)
For my parents.
And in memory of Tom Johnson.
I do not want to choose between
the right and wrong sides of the world,
and I do not like a choice to be made.
—ALBERT CAMUS
GILAD
24 YEARS OLD
You live in one place. The next day you live somewhere else. It isn’t complicated. You get on a plane. You get off.
People are always talking about home. Their houses. Their neighborhoods. In movies, it’s where they came from, where they came up. The movies are full of that stuff. The street. The block. The diner. Italian movies. Black movies. Jewish movies. Brooklyn or whatever.
But I never really got that. The streets were never running through my blood. I never loved a house. So, all that nothing-like-home stuff doesn’t really register. The way you can be living in one place and then in a few hours you can be living somewhere else, that’s what I think about when I think about home. You wake up, do what you do, eat, go to sleep, wake up, eat, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. The same thing for days, months, years and then, one day, you’re no longer there.
People always say how hard it must be to move from place to place. It isn’t.
When I got here I was seventeen. We moved from Riyadh where we’d been living for nearly two years. I had three weeks to pack my things, to “prepare” myself. That was my father—three weeks to “prepare” myself. I don’t know what that means really. It took me an hour to pack my bags. I didn’t tell anyone at school I was moving.
The year ended, I kicked around the pool for a while and then we were on a plane and gone. That’s just the way it happened. I didn’t feel much of anything. I was only amazed again that a world simply disappears behind you, that one life becomes another life becomes another life becomes another.
And then we lived in Paris.
We lived in Dubai, Shanghai, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Jerusalem, and Riyadh.
And then we lived in Paris. And Paris was different because it was the last place we moved as a family. The last place imposed upon me.
WILL
38 YEARS OLD
The optimism, the sense of possibility and hope comes at the end of August. There are new pens, unmarked novels, fresh textbooks, and promises of a better year. The season of reflection is not January but June. Another year passed, the students gone, the halls silent. You’re left there alone. The quiet of a school emptied for the summer is that of a hotel closed for winter, a library closed for the night, ghosts swirling through the rooms.
There is the quick disintegration. The bell rings and the whole thing explodes into the bright day. You walk into the sunshine, dazed by the light.
* * *
The windows are open. I’m in the corner of the room. The June breeze sways the poplars on the far edge of the field. The halls are quiet, the students in assembly.
On the walls are fifteen portraits of the Bundren family. There’s a poster advertising a forgotten RSC production of Macbeth, the Cartier-Bresson photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre with Jean Pouillon on the Pont des Arts. There’s another of Sartre at the Café de Flore, one of Camus smoking a cigarette, an old Cool Hand Luke poster, and one for the premiere of After Hours. There’s Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Olympic podium—heads bowed, fists raised. Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, a bulletin board covered with poems, Hemingway standing with Sylvia Beach