Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  It isn’t Melissa.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from May 2004

  I give up, mati. I gave up.

  This book about my life cannot be written. Not by me, anyway. I still write but it’s not a book anymore. Now I write everything.

  I write “mati” and I have no idea who I mean by that. It’s been so long since I told you the truth. Everything that was meant for you I gave to these pages. You have no clue who I really am.

  I read everything I wrote. Why do I write about Mustafa? Why does Mustafa have my memories? Why did I kill off Ana? Why did I make Asmir into such a dick? Why did Mustafa put his own picture on his brother’s grave? I think I wanted him to be alive. The picture was Mustafa’s scam to not have to fight anymore, to run away, pull off a disappearing act, start anew, live some of my life.

  I would like that very much myself. A new beginning. Old body, old mind, old stuff forgotten and done for. New body, new mind, new stuff. What a dream.

  * * *

  Ben and Jen, they are worried about me. Ever since Melissa moved out of the house they feel obliged to try and get me through it. They knock on my door and tell me jokes. They have people over for barbecues. They invite me to play cards or Trivial Pursuit or disc golf in the park. But there’s fear in Jen’s eyes nowadays. It’s probably the gun. I made a mistake of showing it to her. When she comes home before her boyfriend, she stays in their part of the house—“just picking up,” she would have me believe—and doesn’t come out until he returns.

  I stopped going to school, mati. I haven’t paid my part of the rent. I think they’re gonna kick me out.

  I’m sorry you had to give birth to me, love me.

  You felt no contractions. They had to induce. When they pulled me out of you I was blue and dead. They unwrapped the umbilical cord from around my neck and depressed my tiny chest inward and blew icy air down my throat. I came alive. They made me live.

  You tell cute stories. About everybody congratulating you on the size of me. You’re a small woman. I was more than ten pounds. Big head. Full of hair. Late, too. I sucked up all the calcium out of your body. They had to pull out a bunch of your teeth. Now, at fifty-four, you’ve got osteoporosis to deal with. Crumbling bones. And that head on me. You never peed right again. Wore pads all your life, didn’t you? Plus your stretch marks. Rivulets. Like the surface of Mars.

  I’m sorry about all that.

  But you would laugh this off and say that two nurses came in to match the newborns with the new mothers in your hospital room and that the first one carried in six babies, three on each arm, all bound in white and wrapped like minimummies and that the second nurse followed with this one colossal infant all by itself with this big dark head that flopped around—me. I had no muscles to support a thing like that. You would say that it was the best day of your life. But that’s just your story. Stories aren’t real.

  I thought of carrying on with the book, writing about what happened when I got to California, how I met Melissa, the love we had. But one thing about forcing a life into a story is that you become a character and when the story ends you do, too. I finished my story of escape and it finished me. There is no more narrative to conjure up and make it make sense and hide behind. Now there’s just the mess of life.

  Mehmed tells me to shut the fuck up when I tell him that I’m not doing well. He thinks that getting out of Bosnia is the only hard part, that I’m a wuss, that if it were him here in San Diego he would be happy and thankful. Maybe he would. Maybe if I stayed in Bosnia I would have been happier, too. I have dreams of Mustafa. I think I saw him in the grocery store the other day trying to break a twenty. I’m afraid of what I might do.

  Sometime ago before Melissa broke it off for good and moved to Los Angeles with this guy, to this green apartment building on Micheltorena Street (yes, I checked it out and parked across the street in front of the elementary school one Friday and stayed up all night but they never came out and in the morning there was this squirrel that used the telephone wire to cross the street above me and I watched its perfectly balanced tail retain the shape of an inverted question mark the whole time and thought that I understood something about loss and love but already the next day, back here in San Diego, it was just a squirrel running cautiously over a telephone wire and I understood nothing), we were talking about us and she said I was stretched too thin, that I lived too many lives.

  Parallel universes, maybe? String theory?

  I will never write to you again, mati, truth or lies. Forgive me. Forget me.

  (. . . shards of i . . .)

  “Being a mother is the worst occupation in the world,” she said in a letter.

  She said she had tried to kill herself again. She said she had a mental crisis and that my dad and my brother didn’t believe her and thought she was doing it out of spite and that she couldn’t handle it and ran into my brother’s room, locked herself in, opened the window, and sat on the sill, dangling her feet from the fourth floor. She said she muttered a final prayer and went to jump off when something stopped her, made her head swoon, and that she noticed four girls waving to her in slow motion from the parking lot below and that the sun made her sleepy and when she snapped out of it there were firemen down there and a swarm of people looking up and that my dad somehow got the door unlocked and pulled her into the room. She said that things in the family had turned to shit ever since I left, that everything changed that night when my theater troupe boarded that bus to Scotland. She said that she misses me dearly, like you would miss a limb. She said she believes in God now. She said that she doesn’t know how long she’ll be around but that I make her happy.

  * * *

  Driving home from school at dusk I do this thing. What I do is I get it up to seventy in the right lane, exit Pershing, step off the gas pedal, and coast my way first up, then down, the arc of the overpass with my arms crossed at chest level. My alignment is all fucked up, and every time, the car veers to the left and follows the curvature of the pavement perfectly on its own—no pilot. At the peak of the overpass I usually look to the right and catch a glimpse of the blade that is the Coronado Bridge at this distance, and in this light, and I imagine what would happen if I just simply closed my eyes and never opened them again.

  A familiar, recurring thought.

  My mind is tainted with the B movies I stay up watching every night because I can’t sleep, and often at the top of the Pershing overpass I’ll visualize jalopies from the 1970s flying off bridges and exploding before they touch the ground, the arms of the dummies in the driver’s seats flopping bonelessly. I laugh at these and take great pleasure in this end-of-the-day-almost-home ritual.

  But every once in a while I really do close my eyes. Not as often as in the beginning when Melissa first left, but I still do it from time to time, when she sends me an e-mail out of the blue or when I see a redhead. As I close them, instead of tensing up I grow limp, and instead of grooving on adrenaline I grow sleepy and think of times past. In that darkness I wish I am elsewhere, or elseone, and I let go. For a moment I’m gone like that and it’s always a terrible thing that my mind does to snap me out of it, remind me where I am and I open my eyes and grasp the steering wheel. It’s a conditioned response, this choosing life; I do it out of habit. Mustafa was forced at gunpoint to eat his brother’s testicles, to slit his throat. That’s choosing life.

  At the first red light I focus on a man in his seventies in short bicycle shorts, his legs tan but shriveled, encumbered with vein knots, jogging painfully across the street in front of me. His face is miserable, the hole of his mouth kidney-shaped, drooping down, letting the air come in and out in short gusts. I’m both delighted and disgusted at this display of human determination to cling to life, to have another good year, another good minute. When I pull up on Mississippi there’s my roommate Ben unloading a boat from the top of his truck. He’s in his ratty tank top showing off his outrigger canoeist triceps.

  “Are
you ready to party?” he asks.

  “Again? Where’s Jen?”

  “Making a shopping list. Listen, maybe you could pick up your room a little bit? We’re having some Scripps people over, too.”

  “I’ll close the door.”

  “C’mon, man, I’ll hook you up with a science chick.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say and go into the house.

  My room is a dungeon, a little cave littered with shit. I shove and kick my backpack and everything else under the bed frame, then lift my mattress up from the floor. There’s an off-white rectangle on an otherwise beige carpet where my mattress was. A cockroach scurries behind Melissa’s old desk in panic.

  Looking at the discrepancy in the color of the carpet I start to cry.

  “Liquor out of a beer mug?” Ben says, catching me in the act in the kitchen. “What is that? Gatorade and Popov?”

  “I call it Piss Galore.”

  “You should call it a Bosnian Travesty.”

  I make another one right in front of him, then go to my room and close the door. I sit in the middle of the bed. It sags, almost collapses. I scoot toward my pillow. It feels sturdier. I bounce a bit.

  I look around. My posters. My books. Her old desk. Her old bookshelf. In the mirror on the closet door this destroyed loser in a polyester shirt and a red face. He takes a swig but his mug is already empty. He lets it fall to the carpet.

  On my answering machine a light is blinking. When I press the button the message is a single word.

  “Mati,” my mother says, or better, cries out, and hangs up. The sound of it is like a cat meowing or like a recent adolescent with a cracked voice warning his mother not to embarrass him in public.

  In the summer of 2003, when I last went home to visit, my parents were at each other’s throats, on the verge of splitting up. Father had become the president of the detergent company and had made a lot of money, which changed him for the worse. He bought this new weekend house on Mount Konjuh and my mother often stayed there by herself while he and Mehmed remained in Tuzla. She couldn’t handle the constant fighting and the calls from unknown women telling her her husband was cheating on her. Father kept on denying any wrongdoing, expressing concern for her mental health in cold and civil terms. Mehmed was mostly in his room on the computer, washing his hands of us all.

  One night that summer, in the new weekend house, I had a dream. In it a black cat grew human-size on our couch, morphed slightly into human form, and started to meow, staring at me. That was it. The cat/person just kept meowing. I woke up but the meowing continued into my waking state. It took me a groggy minute to distinguish between the residual meows from the dream and the meowlike calls that were coming from outside of the house. Barely, I heard someone calling my name.

  I got up and walked out into the brisk morning. Father was gone again; the car wasn’t there.

  “Ismet,” called my mother, and by the weird hollow echo of it I realized that she was calling from inside the well, halfway down the slope of our property. I ran to her.

  Sure enough, there she was, fully clothed in the cold water up to her neck, pale and terrified, holding on to the unscalable, circular cement walls. I lowered a creaky ladder that I found in the shed and she climbed out, shivering. After a hot shower, and from a bundle of blankets, my mother laughed, said that after surviving the war, all those medical problems, and suicide attempts, it would have been pretty funny if she had died in a stupid accident like that.

  But I wonder why I’m recalling this particular memory at this moment. Is it because her voice on the answering machine reminded me of a cat’s meow or is it some kind of warning that something is wrong? She has her ways of communicating bad news.

  I replay the message.

  “Mati.”

  After some back-and-forth I come to the conclusion that she only wanted to let me know she had called. A routine.

  Someone knocks on the door and I become aware of loud music, the din of conversations. How long has the party been going on?

  “Come in.”

  It’s Ben with a plastic cup of wine.

  “I knew I was gonna find you in here, wallowing.”

  “I was checking my messages.”

  “Pull your shit together and come out.”

  Ben and Jen throw laid-back but sophisticated parties for the people from their work, an oceanography lab up in La Jolla. Jen works in administration; Ben dives and cuts kelp entangled around the oceanography instruments with a knife. The result tonight is a houseful of smart, sporty, and sciency people in flip-flops with sand in between their toes, drinking fancy zinfandels and Rieslings out of coffee mugs, swaying to Ethiopian jazz, eloquently discussing anything under the sun, scratching their shapely, tan extremities, and being in every goddamned way better than me.

  I drink another Travesty, pretending to be okay with my otherness, my foreignness, and stumble around gawking at female partyers. They catch a glimpse of my face and immediately abort eye contact and feverishly try to rub a stain out of their tank tops, start a conversation with somebody else, the cat, anybody, or leave the room to refill their full drinks or empty their empty bladders.

  “Hello.” I answer the phone on the last ring before it goes to the machine, heeling my door shut against the din.

  It’s my dad, solemn, somehow annoyed. He asks how I’m doing, am I healthy. The moment I hear him speak I know something’s not right. I ask what is going on.

  “Your mother’s in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “They had to pump her stomach.”

  He can never just come out and say what’s going on.

  “Pills?”

  “Yeah. And this time she cut her veins, too.”

  A girl cackles in the living room. She hoots.

  He keeps talking. I can’t stand him. The way he talks about it, like he’s the victim.

  I wanna stab, burn.

  “She says she did it in the bath the night before, but Mehmed found her around noon the next day, in her bed, dressed.”

  “So she’s out of it now?” I manage through my teeth.

  “They are keeping her sedated.”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t.

  “Listen, she’s not well at all—” he starts, and I hang up the phone.

  I walk to the mirror. I want to see what I look like right now. Right outside my room a chorus of women is screaming how they just want to have fun. My face is pulled. I look like an animal.

  The phone rings. I sit on the edge of the bed.

  Melissa’s old desk. A picture of my parents. Father’s sour smile. Mother’s crazy eyes.

  The phone rings.

  My alarm clock. Past one o’clock.

  The phone rings.

  Melissa’s old bookshelf. The complete Mayakovsky.

  The phone rings and rings and I wait it out.

  I wander out of my room, past some shapes and people.

  It makes no sense. If she drew herself a hot bath, took a bunch of pills, and sliced her veins, this was no cry for help. This was a triple-insured plan.

  I go into the office and stare at the picture of a jaguar on the Greenpeace calendar for a while. Someone comes in and starts to talk and I move away from them into the darkness of Ben and Jen’s room. Through their window I see someone, probably a neighbor, look around to see if she’s being observed, then lean over our gate, pick up one of Ben’s potted flowers, an orchid, and she’s gone.

  I see the horrible scenario play out in my mind: my mother naked in the bathroom grinding sleeping pills with the back of a spoon against the top surface of the washer, her thumb digging in hard, crushing them into powder one by one. Or would she be prepared enough to bring a cutting board with her? Probably would. I see her sweep the baking soda–like powder from the cutting board into a glass of water with the blade of her palm and swirl a spoon in there. The liquid is white now, milky. She murmurs a prayer, drinks it, and steps shakily into the steaming bathtub. I see her
reach for a knife that she had brought with the cutting board, a thin blade, smaller than a finger. She knows which one is the sharpest. Now I see her face, her faraway, fed-up eyes. I see her mean it and I shudder.