You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [52]
“Gilad, go to your room, please.”
He didn’t look at me but instead kept his eyes on my mother, whose expression softened as she saw me.
I pushed the door closed. It was the first time I’d seen my father in weeks.
“Gilad, go to your room.”
I didn’t move. I said nothing. And then he turned to me angrily. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“I’m not messing around, Gilad. Either get the fuck out of the apartment or go to your room and stay there.”
They were both looking at me, my mother’s eyes pleading.
“Gilad, are you fucking deaf?”
“Don’t talk to him like that.” My mother spoke to the floor. Whatever fury there’d been before I walked in had drained from her. Now this pathetic effort to defend me. He ignored her. I couldn’t move.
He took a step. My father, a few inches taller than I was, thicker, came forward, careful, hesitant even, as if he didn’t want to leave my mother alone where she was.
“Gilad,” he said again, “I’m not fucking around. This isn’t your problem. Get out.”
I met his eyes and didn’t look away. I felt as if I might dissolve. I needed to keep looking. If I broke the whole thing might fall, whatever balance there was, whatever was keeping us all still. I couldn’t look away.
“Touch him and you’ll never see me again,” she said. This time in a stronger voice, gathering whatever she could of herself.
And then, still looking at me, he took a quick step toward my mother, swung his right arm backward, and struck her squarely across the face. It was as graceful and precise a stroke as every sweeping backhand I’d ever watched him hit on tennis courts around the world. There was a dull, flat sound. My mother gave a slight contained cry, a fast expulsion of breath. And it seemed as if his eyes had never left mine. He opened his mouth wider as if to speak. At first, nothing, and then, softly, “Do you understand me, Gilad?”
I wanted, with everything in me, to leap at him. I could see it. Feel my fist crushing his jaw. Throwing him through the door. Through the window. Cutting his throat. Tearing him apart. His blood on my knuckles. I felt myself rising to action, building, it was coming, I was tight, I would move, take him by the throat. I’d murder him.
Instead, I looked away toward my mother who was pretending to be concerned rather than afraid. She raised her head slightly and we looked at each other. Then I looked above her head, through the window. There was cold sky behind her. The branch of a plane tree coming and going in the window. Trees beyond bending in the gusting wind. A piece of wire dangling from a rooftop, twirling behind the double-glazed glass. I saw Sacré Coeur, silent and pale in the far distance, pasted to the sky.
“Gilad, get the fuck out.”
Ignoring him, I looked back at her. A spill of red rising across her right cheek, flecks of blood on her lips. Her eyes dull.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to me. And again, “I’m sorry.”
In that apology I found my escape. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my job.
So I left them there.
* * *
That night I stayed in my room. I pissed out the window into the courtyard below. I read. I walked back and forth. I held the door handle. Imagined opening it. Breaking down their door. Cross the fucking room. Dig down. Push. Go.
But I was a coward. I stayed where I was. I looked out into the night and put it all away. I looked out my window and knew that Silver, somewhere in the city, was in his apartment. He’d be reading. Listening to John Coltrane or something. Or at his desk, grading papers. Writing poems maybe. The light low, a beautiful bare-shouldered woman reading on the couch. There he was living his honorable life. I saw it clear as anything.
I thought about the morning, about meeting Colin. The next day we’d fight. We’d fight against something important. Tomorrow we’d be brave.
* * *
I woke up very early and left. Their bedroom door was closed. In the weak