The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  Staring at the street below, his memory like a sticky web that captured and constricted him absolutely, he tecalis a time when he stood on girders naked to the wind as everything was under construction and he was then Ulysses tethered to the mast, taking in the promise of dreams cast into oceans filled with feasts of plenty, expecting to draw from the sea his fair share of bounty and never to tumble. “Myth,” he says in response to what otherwise came his way, and gazing at the sights below, sets his eyes on shapes and visions so far removed as to be observed now only from a distance.

  Tyler stretched out on his bed, a large man in T-shirt and undershorts, his weight pressing a curve in the mattress, his heels dangling off the front a few inches above the floor. A hot night. An evening not made for sleep, he listened for Oz as the ticking in his head grew worse and the hours fell away. Around 5:00 a.m. he got up and went into the kitchen where he sat at the table and sipped old coffee. Oz was moving about the front room, seeing to last-minute details, his suitcase and coat by the door, an overflow of papers and letters stuffed into three black plastic trash bags. Other items—clothes and toiletries, books, and linen and additional personal effects not going with him—had already been discarded.

  Oz carried the trash bags into the hall, down the stairs, and into the alley. When he returned, he disappeared into the back of the apartment while Tyler remained in the kitchen, trying to organize his thoughts in a manageable chronology, curious to see how he got here, working his way up from the time Turk first took him in, gave him a room to sleep in, and put money in his pocket. Encouraged to learn a new profession (“You want to stay in the lumberyard forever or what?”), he was taught the rudiments of shakedowns, running numbers, and collecting debts. He learned how to strip cars parked in public lots, which trucks to hijack, and how to break a man’s nose with the heel of his hand. As he grew beyond his father’s size and added serious strength to his mass, his value to Turk increased, and when arrested, as happened now and then, Turk was always there to pull a few strings and bail him out.

  In his early twenties, Tyler almost beat a man to death in a protection scheme gone bad, and charged with aggravated assault, Turk did what he could to get the sentence suspended. Given Tyler’s record however, the conditions of his release were tied to his enlisting in the service. (“We want this pecker-fuck out of the city” was how the offer was extended.) Tyler refused, considered the consequence of going to jail or simply running off, and only as the agreement was about to be rescinded did he accept the terms.

  He was shipped to Berlin a week after boot camp, where he became part of a peacekeeping force conducting regular tours of Bosnia, Somalia, and the Balkans. For much of the next eight years he also spent time in Africa and the Middle East, Grenada, the Falklands, and Yugoslavia, where he witnessed the carnage in battles he secretly came to question. Although his own past was filled with aggressive acts directed at things he couldn’t control or easily understand, he’d reached an age where factiousness seemed outmoded, and eventually, as a consequence of his experience in the service, he began rethinking his life in general. During the final months of his enlistment, with the rank of sergeant and military benefits including financial assistance for school, he enrolled in engineering classes at the University of Berlin. For someone who struggled to complete twelfth grade, such studies seemed extreme, yet concerned with what he would do once he was discharged and already past the age of thirty, his ambition took hold and acquired momentum.

  The curriculum was difficult, the books and projects assigned demanding the sort of concentration he wasn’t used to, and still he threw himself into each task completely. He favored electrical engineering and studied the theories behind BTUs, coulombs, joules, and ohms. He read his assigned texts and bought used copies of Ugly’s Electrical References, The Art of Electronics, American Electrical Handbook, КС s Problems and Solutions for Microelectronic Circuits, and The Complete Guide to Home Wiring. After a year he considered returning to the States and enrolling in whatever school would have him, but instead he landed a job at Berchup Brothers—a small electronics firm in Hamburg—and transferred his remaining studies to Hamburg Technical University.

  One of his first classes at HTU was taught by a graduate instructor named Osmah Said Almend, a small man in neatly ironed shirts and slacks, a few years younger than Tyler, his skin the color of ginger, with piercing black eyes and thin fingers sprouting from the tiniest of hands. His beard was short and scraggly, and speaking in a reluctant English and halting German only a bit better than Tyler’s, he saved his least flattering comments for the three women and two Americans in his class. “It makes perfect sense you’re confused,” he would say to Tyler, and answering again some such question on MATLAB and microelectronic circuits, would remark, “There are special books for this you know, Mr. Finne.”

  “Books that improve on your teaching, no doubt,” Tyler learned to respond in kind, and as a way of goading his instructor further, wore his old uniform to class one day and from that point on Oz referred to him testily as Sergeant.

  That spring, Tyler was sent from work to rewire a small office whose electrical circuitry was damaged by a water main leak. The job was easy—for all the studying he put himself through, much of the labor he did for Berchup Brothers presented little challenge—and coming up from the basement, he was surprised to find Oz sitting behind the front desk. “So you’re who they’ve sent,” Osmah’s tone was as always mocking. “Do I need to check your work, Sergeant? If I turn on the lights are the toilets going to flush?”

  “I’m afraid we haven’t covered that chapter yet in class, Professor,” he handed Oz the work order to sign, the name, The Band of Forbearance, printed above the address. The office was the size of a small market with several metal desks, a series of file cabinets and maps, dull white walls, and brown tiles crisscrossing the floor. A dozen people were talking on phones unaffected by the flood. Oz examined the bill, produced a folder from the bottom drawer of his desk, filled out and assigned payment to Berchup Brothers, and slid the check toward Tyler, who clipped it to the work order. “What is this place?” he asked.

  “The Band of Forbearance is a Muslim charity,” Oz explained. “I am an officer.”

  “So you’re what, moonlighting?”

  “Minfadluk!‘Teaching you is what I do on the side.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  “But I just told you.”

  At a tavern around the corner, Tyler stopped and had a beer. Since leaving the service his evenings varied between studies, work, and recreation. He knew a few places he could gamble, drink cheaply, and buy a bit of hash. He hit the gym and lifted weights a few nights a week, but in the mood for something different, he found a pay phone and invited a girl from Düsseldorf to keep him company. (Leta was a secretary at HTU with dinosaurian hips, equally large breasts, and the sort of endless ass designed to take a pounding. “What I like about American men,” she said to Tyler beforehand as if an explanation was required, “is their ability to be beastly without the abuse, something German men inherently lack.”) Tyler covered two jobs for Berchup Brothers the next day, and with no classes to attend, returned downtown just after 5:00 p.m. where he decided to stop again at the Band of Forbearance.

  He found Oz sitting as yesterday behind the front desk. “Ahwiz ayh? Back again, Sergeant?”

  “I thought I’d check my work.”

  “Mahlesh. Everything is fine.”

  Tyler dropped into the chair beside the desk and folded his arms across his chest. Curious, though he couldn’t quite say for certain why, knowing he and Oz never got along yet in the mood to chat, he asked, “So what is all this?”

  Oz hesitated before answering, suspicious of the American’s interest, thinking then of his father and the inscrutable way Amir Emam Almend had of turning the most innocent conversation on its head. As a Saudi, born the only son in a house with three sisters and a doting mother, Oz remained close to his father. Amir Almend was an
engineer working for the government, a nationalist schooled in the capital city, an intelligent and ambitious man, a devout adherent to religious tradition who accepted nonetheless the benefits of a full education, he instructed his son on the laws of Islam, repeating over and over again, “As a Muslim, you must abide by all that is holy and requiring of you in terms of obedience, sacrifice, and honor.” He educated the boy on the Quran and the prophet Muhammad, insisting he read—along with the curriculum assigned at school with its emphasis on science and mathematics—books by Fazlur Rahman, Ignaz Goldziher, Al-Ghazzali, and Majid Fakhry.

  Eager to learn, a bright student with a quick, inquisitive mind, Oz accepted his father’s challenge as his sisters had before him. (All three girls went to college, earned graduate degrees, and secured professional careers, embracing a Westernized curriculum also fully endorsed by their father.) Over time, as Oz passed from adolescence into his teens, he tried to resolve the inconsistencies in his father’s convictions: how willing Amir Almend was to rail against the U.S. and complain of Western influences on the Saudi government which was more than passively supporting the transformation of a Muslim state into a consumer republic, and yet how he stopped short of dismissing capitalism and consumerism in total. Amir condemned secular values and imperialistic views, yet preached to his children the significance of Western vision and prudence when focusing on their education and individual goals. It was Western dogma the father espoused when demanding a disciplined career from his son, American dollars Amir Almend earned as he oversaw the construction of office buildings, pipelines and airports, roads and apartments to house all the many government workers, and how was Oz to reconcile his father insisting Western influence was ruining Islam and reducing the will of Saudis to maintain strict adherence to the prescribed laws of diet and prayer when he otherwise championed moving forward in a modern world?

  As his father had some twenty years earlier, Oz studied engineering at the city’s main university. He had great plans for using his education to better the living conditions of his countrymen, but before earning his degree the economic landscape in the country changed, the business relationship between Saudis and America cooled, and political complications affected the internal growth of the entire region. Government workers were left unemployed, communities that once benefited from what seemed endless development fell into disrepair. “You see,” Amir Almend ranted at his son. “This is what comes of such dependence. It’s one thing to learn the ways of the West and educate one’s self accordingly as a means of improving Muslim communities through business and a network of capital investments, and quite another to crawl into bed with these people and adopt their selfish views at the cost of our culture and all we hold dear.”

  Unable to find work in the field for which he was specifically trained, Oz was encouraged to get an even higher degree. “The more qualified you are, the less they will be able to refuse you,” Amir insisted. (It was hard enough at the time for Amir Almend to keep his own engineering position and quite a mark of shame that he could not secure a job for his son.) Osmah spent the summer and much of the following fall working for an urban planning firm in the capital, taking to the job with serious ambition, relishing the idea of bringing refurbishment to Saudi cities no longer prospering and at risk of ruin—a fault he blamed on the West and the unreliable influence the United States imposed throughout the Middle East—impressing his employers with his drafting skills and dedication. He decided to get a dual graduate degree in Urban Planning and Engineering and—again at his father’s suggestion—elected to study abroad. He received a scholarship from Hamburg Technical University and flew to Germany the following spring.

  Three things happened before he left that set the tone for his Hamburg years. Fearing a loss of connection to his Muslim roots and determined not to lose sight of who he was when he moved abroad, Oz decided to dedicate himself more completely to Islamic tradition. He embraced anew the precepts of fate and faith, destiny, and purity without compromise, redoubled his efforts on diet and prayer, rejected all forms of alcohol and pork, going so far as to scrape the frosting from cake on the off chance it contained lard. In the course of further commitment, he threw himself into the project he’d spent much of the summer working on, the refurbishing of government apartments in the capital and surrounding cities run down as a consequence of a stalled economy and lost jobs. The plan was to create schools and specially subsidized shops, and Oz was devastated to learn at the last minute the ventute was terminated, that instead the buildings were to be razed and replaced with a Holiday Hilton, Pizza Hut, and Chili’s restaurant—all with new American financing—and that the surrounding neighborhoods would be torn down as well in order to improve the area for tourists.

  “It’s a crime against us!” Osmah raged as his father once did, cursing his own government and its complicity with the West. “Are we a Muslim nation or a playground for the United States?” To his surprise, his father remained subdued in his response, and when Oz eventually learned that Amir Almend was employed as the supervising engineer on the Holiday Hilton site, the son left for Germany with no immediate plan to return.

  He came forward in his chair, his small hands placed in front of him on the desk, and staring at the American seated nearby said, “All of this is Allah,” in answer to Tyler’s question. Before saying more however, he stopped and asked something of his own. “Exactly what sort of soldier are you, Sgt. Finne?”

  “I’m out of the service,” Tyler corrected him. “Discharged two years ago this spring.”

  “When you were in then. Were you an active participant?”

  “I saw action, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Where?”

  “Here and there.”

  “So you participated in implementing America’s imperialistic policies and are a supporter now of what is taking place in Iraq?”

  “Hold on there, Professor,” Tyler felt himself being backed into a corner, and refusing to be pigeonholed, said of his time in the service, “I was part of a peacekeeping force. There was nothing imperialistic going on. Any action I took part in was a calculated response to serious aggression.”

  “Aggression the United States had no legitimate reason being involved in to begin with.”

  “Maybe so. But I saw innocent people die on both sides. How many more would have died, Kurds, Muslims, Arabs, Serbs, if America wasn’t there in the first place?”

  “So you were in Bosnia?” Oz shifted forward once more. “As part of a peacekeeping force you say, and now you want to know how many more would have died without the Americans?” He shook his head and described the American effort in Yugoslavia as, “Worse than incompetent. While you GI Joes were marching aimlessly through the hillsides, setting up random roadblocks and sniffing out one in a million land mines, your placement in the country shut down supply routes and drove innocent people directly into the line of fire where armed Serbs lay in wait. I was there, too,” Oz explained how the Band of Forbearance had ties to a dozen countries hoping to provide aid to Muslims in need. “I was in Bosnia for a month my first summer in Hamburg as part of a group from the Band working with displaced Muslims in the Croatian port of Split. I heard their stories and saw firsthand the effect of rape and torture and murder upon Bosnian refugees. I learned how the Serbs referred to themselves as Orthodox Christians on a crusade against Islam and a mission of ethnic cleansing to kill us all.

  “What good did America’s intervention do?” he spoke as if the collapse of Yugoslavia was somehow the fault of the West, and what took place between the Serbs and Muslims and Croats was a domino toppled by an American plan gone horribly wrong and otherwise not part of a thousand years of internal unrest. He recounted his work in aiding fellow Muslims through efforts organized by the Band, and did not mention the additional enterprise he’d recently undertaken separate from his charity work; how he prayed regularly now at the Al-Tauhid mosque—a black-walled room in the back of a butcher shop—where the imam, Ahmed E
mam, preached bitterly against the West, referred to America as the enemy of Islam, and insisted under the edicts of the Qur’an that every part of American influence be purged from Muslim lands.

  Tyler sat back in the small metal chair, listening to Oz while looking around the room again at the Muslim men—there were no women, no Americans or Germans—and in response to Oz’s diatribe on America, decided to say only, “This Band of Forbearance sounds like a huge undertaking.”

  Osmah in his halting English, though in a tongue no longer completely foreign, replied in kind, “A good deal of undertaking, yes.”

  CHAPTER 7

  CHURNING THE WATERS

  “How do you feel, Bailey?”

  “Good.”

  “Convince me.”

  “Can’t we just get on with it?”

  “Soon. For now, I want you to tell me.”