Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  “Mati,” her message screams in my ear.

  I’m stupid.

  So fucking stupid.

  Somebody’s face is in front of mine, round and bearded. Its mouth is moving, baring American teeth. There is something in each of my hands now, too.

  I don’t know what to do.

  There are pills in my hand. And a beer.

  The blade slices my mother’s veins; blood squirts out and clouds up the bathwater. Her head bangs backward into the bathtub enamel. Her mouth fills up with water now the consistency of a bland rosé, and only her nose, her eyes, and her forehead stick out of it.

  Is she breathing?

  My eyes feel like they are frying in oil.

  “You all right?” someone says behind me.

  “Yeah,” I say, without looking to see who it is. I look at my hands instead. One empty bottle of beer now.

  “We’re all going night swimming.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Okay. Suit yourself.”

  Silence. Past two o’clock.

  I aim the pistol at my reflection in the mirror and wonder what would happen if I fired. I wonder if the mirror would shatter or if the slug would only make a hole or if the person in the mirror would suddenly spring a bullet hole in his forehead and slump down dead.

  * * *

  Past three o’clock.

  There’s a bottle of vodka in my hand, and a pistol in my hand, and a phone. I go out the back door, lose my balance, and fall into Ben’s dewy ice plants. I try to get up and then give up on it, pour some vodka on the lower part of my face, and look around. Through the flimsy hedges I can see the glowing blue surface of the next-door neighbor’s pool and nobody in sight.

  For a moment it’s like I hear gunfire. For a moment it’s like I’m in the middle of a war.

  Something moves underneath the house.

  “Mustafa, is that you?” I call into the shadows.

  I remember meeting this Bosnian guy in 1997 who was in Thousand Oaks for some famous doctor to fix his foot after it was blown apart in battle. He was staying with his uncle, and my uncle knew his uncle. He was crazy and scary (kept calling himself Apache) but I hung out with him anyway and milked him for war stories. The things he told me made me hollow. What he had survived made me feel unworthy of calling myself a Bosnian.

  I was never forced to eat human testicles or shoot at another human being or watch pigs eat my fellow citizens. No. I ran away instead. That’s what I did. That’s my story. I left my mother behind, my father, my brother, my first love. That’s it. The end.

  That’s why Mustafa is here, the shadow under the house.

  “Here I am,” he says in Bosnian, confident, smiling.

  Mustafa knows the sobering horror of getting a mouth-to-mouth from a gun. He knows the reason why this man in the ice plants grasps for the steering wheel at the last moment, why he can’t pull the trigger now. He steps up and takes the pistol away from him.

  “Pussy,” he says, smiling, aiming.

  He sits in the ice plants for a long time, looking at his hands, feeling the breeze on his new skin, getting used to this.

  The inside of the house throbs with the flickering lights of a TV screen. It’s like watching someone weld inside a manhole.

  From beneath the house a mama raccoon comes out and looks at him. She does so practically, as though trying to ascertain his threat level, realizes he’s fine, goes back under the house, and slowly proceeds, one baby raccoon in her mouth at a time, to waddle through the hedge, dunk the whole litter of four in the pool water and then carry them back to the burrow.

  When she’s done and gone he stands up—hands on knees, testing his new, uneasy, collapsible legs—and stumbles into the house with a clear plan to do three things:

  Drink a gallon of water

  Get rid of the pistol

  Live his new life

  (. . . shards of m . . .)

  I’m lying on my back and staring into the night sky, looking for the face of God. The sky is carved with projectiles. They leave cat scratches of white fire against the vast blackness.

  Things are exploding. The earth is quavering.

  I’m murmuring ancient Arabic phrases that carry no meaning for me because I learned them phonetically when I was a kid.

  I’ve shit myself. I’ve pissed myself. I’m cold.

  I’m praying the only way I know how and hugging my empty rifle.

  I’m halfway between the trenches.

  Mustafa felt drained with uncertainty, frustrated by his confusion. He drifted in and out of sleep, dreams, memories. He slipped into the past, woke up in the present, dreamed about the future. Or he slipped into the future, woke up in the past, dreamed about the present. Or slipped into the present, woke up in the future, and dreamed about the past. The way his brain processed it, it was one of those things—his past was in the present tense, and his present was . . . well, the present was anything but explainable in terms of something as simplistic as past and present. The present was scrambled. The present was shattered, then scrambled. Shattered, then pulverized, then scrambled.

  It was all fucked up.

  In the darkness, Mustafa tried to express some of the pain but the pain there in his throat was terrible. It was in the cartilage. In the jaw. In the loose splinters of his Adam’s apple, apparently wedged in his windpipe, causing him to wheeze.

  “I’ll fuck you into shaaaards!!!” a male voice shrieked in the distance, through walls, it seemed, down corridors. Something metallic and empty clanged against some wall somewhere and came to rest on an equally hard-sounding floor.

  A pot? A tray?

  “I’ll break you like a vase! You’ll crumble like Marshal Tito’s bust!” shrieked the voice.

  Mustafa became aware of other voices around him, four or five at least, weak, mumbling, grunting, swearing in the darkness.

  Captured? Jail?

  He tried to understand the here and now, but there was nothing on which to build a reality. Just darkness. He managed to rub his fingertips over the surface he was lying on and succeeded in suppressing his pain long enough to have an unmolested realization: fabric.

  A bed?

  Somewhere doors banged open, and beefy footsteps boomed louder as they got closer to the I’ll-fuck-you-into-shards voice, which promptly became unintelligible shrieking, like tearing the living darkness in two. There were meaty thuds of bodies full of guts and breath, colliding with one another and the surfaces around them, whimpering and pleading to be left alone. But then, the voice slowly died down, and the beefy footsteps walked calmly away accompanied by the rhythmic squeaking of a wheel in dire need of grease.

  A cart? A gurney?

  Mustafa caught a whiff of human shit and peeled citrus over a more antiseptic underscent of industrial-strength bleach that tickled his throat and threatened to make him cough. He summoned some courage to try to move again, to test the weight that was pressing on his chest and throat, when something scraped against the floor right next to him.

  A chair leg?

  Someone whispered a name that was not his.

  Who spoke? A woman? A man?

  Someone’s clothes rustled with movement and then a soft, cold hand tenderly cupped his clammy forehead and the mere thought of screaming in terror made Mustafa exchange the darkness around him for another.

  Despite the shame and the embarrassment of the bee fiasco, he said yes.

  Mustafa said yes because she was cute and petite and coquettish. Because she wore Doc Martins and ripped jeans and he kind of had a crush on her. Because he believed that they could end up being together for a long time.

  Bullshit. He said yes because at that age you never, ever say no to anybody who one day, potentially, might pop your cherry.

  When she winked at him and said, Let’s go, he said yes. She said, Yes, what? and he said, Yes, let’s go. They made out in the dewy grass in front of her building until ten minutes before the curfew when she had to phy
sically push him off her. She gave him a handmade bracelet she always wore and asked him, Do you know what this is? He didn’t really, but he said yes and she killed him with a kiss. Then he hauled ass home.

  The very next night Mustafa made an almost fatal mistake by teasing her and calling her a little girl. She was fifteen then. They were in front of the Bosnian National Theater, the newest hot spot in their fun-filled besieged city. She slapped his face and stormed off just to come back a minute later and throw a bloody tampon at his head, right in front of everybody. He was more confused than a glob of human sperm in the third chamber of a frog’s heart.

  That same night, as he walked home alone, she jumped out of the bushes by the river’s embankment and kicked him in the groin. The gun looked huge in her little hands. She squatted over his convulsing body and aimed at his right eye. She kept spitting into the grass over his head. She squatted there for a long time, spitting, looking.

  There was no doubt in his mind that the brain behind those fierce eyes was going to send a motor stimulus to the muscles of her tiny hand, which were going to squeeze that trigger and send him to the land of wooden poles and toilet bowls for good. And he couldn’t think of a single thing, to say or otherwise. His life didn’t flash in front of his eyes. He didn’t think of loved ones. He didn’t think of hated ones either. He just cupped his nuts—a laughable instinct from the receiving end of a 9 mm Zastava.

  He would later come to believe that she saw something in his eyes that made her decide not to kill him. Perhaps it was the total absence of him from himself. Whatever it was she calmly removed the bracelet from his wrist, walked away, and never looked at him again.

  Things changed big-time for him after this incident. He stopped going out and spent most of his time with the basement dwellers, which is what everyone called those people who never accepted the war as normalcy and lived in fear underground.

  A year later somebody found the body of a guy named Goran, who he heard was her second boyfriend, in the middle of Banja Park. He had been shot and stabbed numerous times. The story was that he pressured her into having sex with him and then, during a quarrel, threatened to tell her dad, a devout Muslim, about it. Apparently she convinced her little brother to help her take care of the problem and they killed him together. Since her mother was a judge, she ended up in Kreka Psychiatric Hospital.

  And even though Mustafa was drafted and made to go and fight, and had seen people blown to bits, cadavers rotting in the trenches, children’s heads atop wooden sticks, crosses carved into abdomens and foreheads; and even though he had a lot of close calls like that time the shrapnel went through the van and through the folds of his shirt around the midsection when he was bending to tie his boot, still the closest he had ever been to death was the moment before she reclaimed her bracelet. In all those other instances his life did flash before his eyes and he did think about loved ones and about those he didn’t like.

  “So . . . there was this kid they called Donut,” said a raspy, Waitsian voice, and Mustafa came to and so did the pain. There was too much light on the other side of his eyelids now and he dared not open them yet.

  “He was a little off, if you know what I mean. Drank barbecue sauce out of a glass, crapped in the elevator, threw firecrackers into people’s mailboxes. He was some kind of a diabetic . . . something to do with blood sugar, too much or too little, I don’t know. I once saw him out there in the parking lot setting a dead cat on fire and then pretending to take pictures of it with a piece of shrapnel instead of a camera. Craay-zee little bastard.”

  The man’s voice was rushed but the words came to him with ease, like he had the story memorized, like he had told it a million times using the same words, the same pauses, the same inflections. Mustafa peeked out of his left eyelid, letting in streaks of white light, some of them stained with mint green, through the bars of his eyelashes. Still way too much light. He switched to the right eye then, trying to acclimate them both.

  “They said he went nuts because of the war. Like the war is the only thing that makes shit happen. Kid gets Fs, it’s because of the war. Husband cheats on his old lady with the lady downstairs, it’s because of the war. Daughter turns gay, it’s because of the war. Bunch of bullshit.”

  Mustafa opened his eyes and saw that he was in a hospital room, which explained the bleach and the citrus and the shit. It explained the weak voices and the grunts and the swearing. It explained the whiteness of light and pale, mint green walls. The cast he was in from the waist up to his chin explained his immobility and his pain, and the heavy bandage around his neck suggested that there might be a reason for the fire in his throat and the thunder in his jaw. The man directly across from him, a balding fellow with the head and neck of a buzzard, met his eye and smiled a deranged, yellow smile. Mustafa knew his face.

  “Good morning, neighbor. Finally, an audience,” he said. “All these other fuckers are as good as kindling.”

  The glee in his neighbor’s eyes and his wiggling eyebrows like a hairy caterpillar cut in half on his Slavic forehead and the straps with which he was tied to the bed hinted to Mustafa what kind of hospital he’d just woken up in.

  “What was I talking about? Oh yeah. So . . . every time a shelling dies down, out come these children to hunt for shrapnel. It’s like a collecting deal . . . like children collecting marbles and things. So they are walking around with these . . . sacks of shrapnel, comparing and trading, whathaveya. But this Donut kid is fanatical. He thinks he can recreate a shell by putting together all the shards. Insane!”

  Mustafa glanced around the room and counted seven other beds occupied with elderly men lying on their sides, their faces in agony and old and puffed with medication-induced slumber. Out the window the day was gray, and the tops of trees were in their flimsy underthings, shivering.

  “So one day I’m sittin’ there on the stairs and I overhear Donut and this other kid arguin’ . . . about, you know, who has the biggest shrapnel, who has the weirdest-looking ones, and so on and so forth, and this grandma from the first floor there, what’s her name? . . . Um . . . Shit . . . Mrs. Abdi! That’s it! Anyway, she’s on her balcony, hanging out, she hears them, and goes, ‘That’s nothing, my dears. I have one in my living room that’s this big.’ ”

  The man tried to show how big the shrapnel was supposed to have been but realized his hands were tied to the bed. He smiled sheepishly, as if embarrassed. For the first time Mustafa noticed a cluster of bruises on the side of the man’s face.

  “I’m thinking the grandma’s a little senile, there’s no way that there’re shrapnel that big, I don’t give a shit if it’s a fuckin’ Tomahawk. Little Donut cries that he wants to see it. Can he come and see it? Can he please come up and see it? Grandma says, ‘Sure, come up.’ I’m thinking, I better take a look at this shit myself. Knowing this kid, he might do something bad, and I don’t want the poor woman having a seizure on account of that. So I wait a few seconds, then start up the stairs after him.

  “When I go in, there’s a sight to see. Right there, in the middle of the sofa, wedged in there, sticking half out, is a whole, goddamn shell! A whole, goddamn, unexploded, fucking mortar shell!”

  Something in Mustafa’s mind scraped and he . . .

  We’re here.

  Everyone in the village is dead, piled up.

  I’m choking and holding it in and choking and holding it in.

  I can’t hold it in anymore. I’m chok . . .

  “What happened was that it hit the stove, mangled it but didn’t explode, and ricocheted into the sofa. Grandma goes, ‘It came through the window a couple of nights back, hit the stove, look what it did. I tried to get it out, I banged at it with a hammer. I can’t move it one bit.’”

  The man’s eyes grew huge.

  “I’m real shook up right now, you see. There’s a damn explosive device in the house. I’m so shook up, I’m confused. And Donut, that crazy little bastard, goes right up on top of the damn thing tryin’ to pull it out
. If I didn’t shit myself right then and there, I never will. You crazy little bastard! I pull him off the shell and he starts nippin’ at my arm. Well I start hollerin’, I smack him a good one across the mouth. I yell, ‘Everybody out of the room! You’ll blow us all sky-high!’”

  Steamboat is crying, too. I can see that he can see me see him crying and he turns away and coughs. He kicks over the body of a dead Chetnik to see his face. The fucker looks like us but his face is splotched, a burgundy hole in his cheekbone, the eye above it swollen and closed.

  “And as I’m getting them all out a ‘Goddamn’ slips from me, and the grandma goes crazy. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain this! Don’t swear that!

  “God don’t care, I tell her. It’s just a word. But she has none of it.”

  Then the back of Steamboat’s head is a red blur. And he drops. And I go as if to help him, instinctively, floppily, and someone yells:

  “Ambush! Retreat!”

  And by then I’m gone.

  Then I had a dream that I was hanging out in the Albatros, only the place was bigger and it didn’t have the stage but was more like a club I used to frequent. The floors were dirty granite and the walls were pure black. I stood watching the people come in and I could see both from the perspective of me in the dream as well as that of me as a camera on the ceiling. So there was me standing there looking out of my skull but there was also me looking down at myself looking out of my skull, and the feeling of psychic immensity overwhelmed me as I saw myself backing toward a corner and across the room of dancing people. To my right a curtain opened revealing a DJ behind a glass wall like in radio stations, and the DJ was a familiar face and he played vinyl records and I can’t remember which ones and then there were Hare Krishna with their little percussion section chanting around. Then the music stopped and this muezzin appeared behind the glass and the DJ equipped him with headphones and a microphone, nodding his head. The muezzin began to pray in Arabic and I didn’t understand what the words meant just that it was filling me up and then everything stopped and I started to levitate up toward the ceiling, into the lighting fixtures, and my chest bulged with incomprehensible joy as I saw pure light pour out of me and something in my chest kept saying God is here God is here God is here God is here God is here God is here God is here and it might have been my own voice saying God is here and I could see all the oblivious people dancing in the club as well as my own collapsing face agape, eyes open with God is here and then