Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  The cops finally got the gate open and Mustafa, his face covered in mud, blood and spittle, calmly walked toward them and toward the red-eyed cameras.

  * * *

  Mirsad, the buzzard man, he was taken away. Not just him but his whole bed. The mint green gap that Mustafa was now forced to face all day was a smile with a missing tooth. The bed to the left of it, the dead man’s deathbed, had another candidate in it, another slab of fed-up forehead, another pair of dry twig arms, another wheezing whine. The sky was invisible through the window from all the clouds. The rain was falling outside. And shells were falling. And the world was falling apart.

  The nurses changed Mustafa’s piss bags (often) and shit bags (seldom), commenting on the amounts, colors, frequencies. They squirted salty mush through his barely open mouth and massaged the sides of his throat to ease the swallowing. They dragged lukewarm sponges over the surface of his rapidly diminishing body, giving extra care to all the hairy nooks and crannies.

  The doctor changed his jaw and throat bandages, looked at the stitches from all angles, smiled sad smiles, and always touched his shoulder. The family members of Mustafa’s hospital roommates mostly ignored him, just as they mostly ignored their hapless old relatives. They moved around, working hard not to look into their eyes, and fussed about the blankets, curtains, and juice boxes. They gave quick pecks on the foreheads and short, crushing squeezes on the arms, mumbled feeble words of encouragement, and took their swift leaves.

  His own family never came or came when he was out of it, but he never saw them while he was in there. He was having trouble even picturing them in his mind. All his memories of them seemed muddled and grainy. Only the woman who thought she was his mother came in every night after visiting hours were over, most likely sneaking away from the ward upstairs. She held his hand and patted his forehead. She sighed and cried, asked why he was so distant to her, asked him if he remembered this or that, gave him news about his supposed relatives: that his uncle Fajko was mobilized into the army, that a shell had hit his father’s garage and totaled his car, that his brother was having a hard time acclimating to his new school, that he just wanted to sleep all the time. She even brought him a letter that he supposedly received from the army and started to read it aloud to him.

  “We regret . . . to inform you,” she read, sniveling, “that your unit . . . was . . . decimated in the enemy counterattack—”

  Her emotions had their way with her and she abruptly started to sob, folded the letter, stuffed it into a blue envelope, and left it on his bedside table.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

  What conviction, he thought.

  “They list most of your unit . . . they are all dead . . .”

  As soon as the Claw walked in Mustafa remembered everything. He remembered the bulldozer, the ambush, and the rain. He remembered the tree and the chunk of the tree that fell on him. He remembered the stench of shit and the cold ring of his prayers in the night. He remembered his real mother, his real father, and his real brother. His family. He remembered everything.

  He also remembered what the Claw did for him, how he called him by his name, how he came back for him because no man was ever to be left behind. He remembered that the Claw would die a week after the war was over, or rather he knew. How strange, he thought. He knew that his war buddy would be on the way to the command to receive the Golden Lily and that the asphalt would cave right under his feet and that he would fall into a deep hole caused by the town’s saltwater exploitation and break his neck.

  “What’s up Mustafa, you pussy’s worst foe?” boomed the Claw now. “Is that you or did someone take a shit?”

  Mustafa wanted to tell his fellow Apache both what he remembered and what he knew but the pain in his throat was bursting. All he could do was look, and when he did, for a while all his eyes could do was cry.

  “You’re crying, you pussy,” the Claw said, only this time he looked away and choked something down before it was too big. He walked around and sat on the chair. He ran out of words. He swallowed audibly.

  “Sooty says hi. He’s better now. They got him good, in the stomach and in the ass but he’s better. The bulldozer rolled over his foot and they cut off his heel. He’s gonna go to some place called Thousand Oaks in California to get a new one. They are letting him go.”

  Mustafa strained to look into his eyes but the Claw was leaning forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees, his hands exploring each other, going through all the poses. His eyes darted sideways and every once in a while his facial tic took over them. He noticed the blue envelope on the bedside table and picked it up.

  “Motherfuckers,” he said, scanning the contents. “I got one too: Your country thanks you for your valiant service in these times of war. We sent you on a fucked-up mission in a fucking bulldozer and you all got killed. Chetniks retook the village the next day so it was all for nothing. Thank you for your lives. In return we will list your names on this piece of paper and not even bother to find out your Apache nicknames, the fucking sacks of shit.”

  He took a pen out of his pocket and started to scratch out the soldiers’ real names and write down their nicknames instead.

  Almir Muteveli became Steamboat.

  Dragan Krsti became Ninja.

  Vedran Deli became the Lump.

  Damir Verlaševi became Hammer.

  But in the letter’s salutation, the Claw had, for some reason, blacked out the name to which the letter was addressed and written Mustafa above it in a surprisingly bubbly longhand. When Mustafa later read over it he realized that he was right, that that woman was crazy and the letter had been addressed to someone else, not him. Looking at the paper all he could discern under that uneven rectangle of black ink was the first letter of the first name in the salutation, which looked like an L or perhaps an I. It was like reading a government-censored document; it was impossible to be 100 percent certain.

  NOTEBOOK THREE:

  BOOM-BOOM*

  * * *

  *The San Diego Police Department found the third notebook, titled “BOOM-BOOM,” in Izzy’s car, which was parked on La Jolla Shores near the university, some three hundred pages of it. In the notebook was the following note: “I, Ismet Prci, the author and the characters of these chicken scratches, residing in a silver 1981 VW Scirocco with licence plate #_____, generally located around San Diego County, being of (finally) sound mind, do hereby declare this instrument to be the last will and testament of my life. However, I do not hereby revoke any previous chicken scratches and codicils. I direct that the disposition of my remains be as follows: Burn me until none of me is left. I give all the rest and residue of my estate to Eric Carlson of ____ Los Feliz Drive, Thousand Oaks, CA 91362, to do with as he pleases, should he survive me for sixty days. The only condition is that he read all of this and try to piece me together.” Bound as I am by this last will and testament, I’m including a portion of this notebook here.

  (. . . the absurdity of reality,

  the mind-boggling, fucking

  unlikeliness of it all . . .)

  . . . It came to me, Eric. It came to me in a dream. I finally understand EVERYTHING! Listen:

  In the beginning there was Light. In the beginning there was the Word. In the beginning there was the Voice. In the beginning there was the Voice using Words to bring the Light into existence by uttering the word Light into the void. Thus, out of the void came the light and from it everything else. But if something can be created out of nothing then something and nothing are made out of the same material, so to speak. If something can be created out of nothing by the sheer utterance of sound that gives meaning to it, then the only difference between something and nothing is in the naming. By calling nothing something, nothing becomes something, but the truth remains that nothing really changes in the great scheme of things. The physical constitution of nothing/ something, if it can even be called that, remains the same.

  That means that heaven = hell = pu
rgatory = void = return to God. Eternal life = death forever. Mahatma Gandhi = Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda = UNICEF. Good and bad are indistinguishable. 0=1=2=3= . . . =forever.

  Nothing is everything because there isn’t anything.

  Now, the sad thing is that some pieces of this nothing thought themselves up, imagined themselves up, then thought up and imagined and created this thing called reality. These little nothings got very caught up in all this reality they invented, and made it very complex and cyclical, so much so that it made them forget that they were really, in essence, still nothing. It made them stupid. It made them real.

  We are the descendents of these stupid, real people who forgot that they were nothing. So we go on epic journeys, from nothing to nothing, we start in nothing and end up in nothing, we never leave nothing, but we perpetuate our delusions. On some level we know we’re nothing but we’re too scared to think about that. The whole time we’re making this journey from nothing to nothing, we sense, we hope, that there is someone, something out there, a third presence that follows us, watches over us, narrates us, dreams us into being, and we hope that this being means something, is something. What is this something we hope is out there?

  1. Fill in the blank:

  The third presence is _____________?

  a. God

  b. The narrator

  c. Ismet

  d. Mustafa

  e. What?

  f. Me

  g. You

  h. Who gives a shit?

  i. Something

  j. Nothing

  k. All of the above

  l. None of the above

  m. All/none of the above

  If you answered “m. All/none of the above,” you are on your way to become nothing.

  (. . . monologue . . .)*

  . . . back at the house out of habit, to sneak in a shower when you know your ex-roommates aren’t home, even though you don’t live there anymore, even though your old room is now an office and your old closet is full of Ben’s outrigger paddles and moldy wet suits, and even though Jen said she would call the police if you used the washer and dryer, on the patio again you find the spare key under the terra-cotta Santa Claus underneath the fig tree and go in, strip out of your clothes, and use their soap and shampoo and a towel . . .

  . . . although the love is gone, although she left sometime ago and moved away and took the computer and the bed and the jar of change and left you red hair in the lining of your sweatshirts and on your pillowcase and that scent in your nostrils and in your brain, since you can smell it even out at the beach where the cold winds blow . . .

  . . . and although your mother longs to die back in Bosnia, where your father got up one morning and found her naked in the bathtub with her wrists slit the longitudinal way this time, with her stomach full of Valium and Ativan and aspirin and slivovitz, with her head full of thick blissful nothing, but still alive, and instead of calling for an ambulance, hauled her out of the tub, dried her body with the floor mat and some towels, put a pair of panties and a slip-on nighty on her, dragged her across the parquet and into the bedroom, where he hadn’t noticed her not being all night, lifted her onto her side of the bed, started a load of pink-stained laundry, and slipped out of the house so as not to wake your brother, knowing this depressed young man would not get up before two in the afternoon, because he never does, and went to work as usual, hoping she would finish dying, finish killing herself for once, but was really disappointed when your brother called him in a panic, and after she came out of a three-day coma, bought her an apartment on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper, the same one you saw a woman jump from when you were a toddler, and told her he couldn’t handle the stress of being near her anymore and that they should separate, still denying his involvement with those other women, which brought your mother within an inch of her life in the first place, still denying he left her on her side of the bed to die . . .

  . . . despite the fact that because of all of this your chest most of the time feels inflated with . . . full of what? wrongness? full of whatever the fuck is left in the wake of a lot of love, full of whatever the fuck love turns into when you figure out its insignificance, when you figure out you can’t hold on to the loved ones, you can’t help the loved ones, you don’t know the loved ones, and you want to claw at your chest, stab your fingers through your own breastplate, and pull apart your rib cage like an accordion, the way Superman pulls apart Clark Kent’s suit to get all that love out, all that wrongness out, all that pain, and although this is how bad things are all the time, this day of all days you feel fine . . .

  . . . you feel better because your ex-roommates are gone until tomorrow (you checked on their crew’s Web site at the library: Kae Elua: two-day race in Catalina) and this means you will sleep in their bed, use their computer, and play video games, so you put on some clean clothes and run to the kitchen and make yourself a huge Travesty with their vodka first, then shake some dry food into Johnny Cat’s bowl, and you hear him thump down onto the carpet somewhere in the back of the house and then in a flash he’s there crunching away at the food, loveless and yellow-eyed, and driven crazy by some kind of skin disease that makes him chew his own ass, and you make your way into the office, turn on a video game, a first-person shooter, and choose to become a SWAT commander and lead a band of artificially intelligent police officers into a bank under siege and save three blonde bank employees from masked terrorists who are holding them hostage . . .

  . . . your mission is to save and you have to find your way through the maze of offices and corridors adorned with potted palm trees, water coolers, vent systems, and you find and save two of the three employees but the third one is nowhere to be found, and you kill all the enemies and run around the repetitive gamescapes trying to find her but can’t, you can’t advance to the next level if you don’t save all three, so you kill all the enemies and, out of boredom, kill your fellow squad mates, too, but they keep respawning and you keep on killing them, running out of ammo, picking up their weapons and using them on them . . .

  . . . and then you find her and when you do you realize there’s a glitch in the game’s design, because she’s stuck in a wall and you can’t get her to come with you, because you can’t click on her because she’s in the wall . . .

  . . . and you realize there is stuff on your real face, your face is wet and you cannot breathe through your nose from all the stuff in there and what is the point of saving anything anyway and you get up and go for more alcohol, blowing your nose into your sleeve, but instead pick up the phone and dial your mother’s seventeenth-floor apartment and listen to it ring and ring in Bosnia, expecting her weak hello to crush you, break you, but it just rings and rings and the hum of the silences becomes louder than the electronic toooots and then a taped voice says, Sorry, no one is home, please try your call later, and you panic and dial again and suffer through this whole thing again and again, each time a little more because a part of your mind is screaming WAKE UP, part of it is praying, part of it is coolly observing She’s dead, part of it is negating it, She’s not dead, and you hang up and call your father’s number for the first time in months, that fucker’s number, and your brother answers, sounding sleepy:

  — What do you want?

  — Where is Mother?

  — How the hell should I know? At her place?

  — Shouldn’t you?

  — Whatever.

  — Where’s he?

  — Sleeping.

  — I wanna talk to him.

  — He’s in there with some slut. I’m not going in there.

  — You need to go over to Mother’s apartment right now and check on her.

  — Do you know what time it is?

  — She’s not answering her phone, you fucker.

  — Maybe she took a sleeping pill. Maybe she’s visiting a friend. Maybe—

  — You fucker! You fucker!

  — She’s taking a walk. Maybe she pulled the phone out of the wall.

 
— Maybe she’s fuckin’ dead, fucker? Maybe you two finally pushed her over the edge.

  — Why don’t you fly out here and you check on her? It all started with you leaving, fucker. Remember that? All of this. You should be over here, fucker. You should be here feeling this. Fucker . .

  . . . and the line goes dead and you throw the cordless phone into the butcher block, where it breaks into pieces, and you grab the bottle of vodka out of the pantry and chug until you can’t think anymore, don’t understand why you’re in tears anymore . . .

  . . . morning takes care of itself, chases away the other life, the Apache battle cries and visions of moving sneakers, and even though your jaw dully throbs and it’s hard for you to swallow you go out to your car and grab all the clothes you can and start a load of laundry, then ransack the house for food and money. You try your mother but no one answers. You call your father. Mehmed hangs up on you before you can say hello. You drink the rest of the vodka and watch Judge Judy yell at people until the washer is done washing and the dryer is done drying.

  You realize you forgot to turn off the video game and when you go into the office the bank teller is still running in the wall and your fellow SWAT people have respawned and are going through the motions of looking, covering one another, running to and from the truck, swarming around the woman in the wall whom they can never help, never reach, and you finally understand how absurd, impossible, stupid, shitty, everything is.

  * * *

  * In the margins of these fragments the following note appeared: “PRESTO! STACCATO! Perform almost breathlessly!”

  (. . . boom-boom . . .)*

  Once upon a time there was a . . . Once upon a time there is a . . . prison. A human convict has transgressed against the human society and was put here. Here he has transgressed against the ego of a BOOM! particular guard and for this transgression he is being led down a cavernous black corridor toward the holes. His punishment: forty days of solitary confinement. He has heard stories about the holes, how they dematerialize reality and materialize nothingness. How the particular kind of darkness in the holes can short-circuit the mind. The convict knows all of this, and so, as soon as the key is turned in the lock behind him and he gets the first glimpse of that annihilating darkness and its power, he reaches for a BOOM! button. He first touches his throat knowing that’s where the collar of his prison uniform will be. He investigates in the general area there until he finds the collar and finds the button there, that one button he never uses anyway, because his uniform is too small and buttoning it, even if possible, would seriously hinder his breathing. He finds it, gets a good grip on it, and pulls it off. Th BOOM! e string holding the button in place snaps and suddenly it is in between his fingers, away from the collar, the button. It is round shaped, he feels, because of the way its edges bite into the flesh of his fingertips. It’s metal. It’s flat when he holds it the other way but his skin detects an unevenness and his mind tells him that it’s probably leftover string, so he pulls at it with his nails and sure enough little pieces of string that held the button in its place on the collar are loose between his fingers. He rolls them into a ball and lets it silently fall to the concrete beneath him. It’s of no importance to him because it’s too small. But the button. The button is just the right size. Not too big, not too small. He then extends both of his arms out away from himself in all four major directions and finds out that, standing where he’s standing, he can touch the cell wall to his right and in front of him. His mind does a quick calculation and he makes BOOM! a small diagonal step to the left and back and repeats the arms-extending-in-four-major-directions routine to find that he cannot touch any of the walls now. This is when he starts to spin in his place in the middle of the hole, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times, and on the tenth time he tosses the button over his left shoulder and listens to it plink, plink, plinkety-plink, plink, plink on the concrete until all is silent. Then he goes down on all fours and begins his search for the button. He crawls around for as long as it takes until he stumbles upon it in the dark, picks it up, feels its edges bite into the flesh of his fingertips in that round familiar way, stands up, extends his arms in all four major directions, finds that he can touch the wall behind him now, does a quick calculation and takes a step forward, repeats the armextended- in-all-four-major-directions routine until he finds himself in the middle of the hole, spins around one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times and then tosses the button over his right shoulder and listens to it plink, plink, plinkety-plink, plink, plink on the concrete until there’s a silence, BOOM! goes down on his hands and knees and begins the search anew, and repeats this over and over for forty days. He does this because he knows that if he is to stay himself he needs to keep his mind busy and on-task. He knows he needs to do this because otherwise he is running the risk of losing it, short-circuiting it, the mind. He knows that in the midst of nothing in the middle of the hole, he needs to pretend that there’s something, this task of finding the button over and over, or telling himself a story over and over, to keep the mind busy so it doesn’t short-circuit itself but BOOM! I can’t do it. I can’t keep telling myself this story because the BOOM! shells are hitting closer and closer and the mint green hospital room is vibrating, the beams are creaking, the ceiling is flaking and falling down on me like plum blossoms, and at the same time, somehow, I’m up here staring down, down, and the firmament is melting into a California rain and my heart is climbing up my esophagus and into my throat, into my eye sockets, into my thoughts, pounding there, BOOM! as I wish I were in prison right now, in a hole, in the middle of it, on my hands and knees searching for a bBOOM! utton instead of suffering this pounding, the pounding of shells on this fucking hospital, this pounding rain, this pounding in my head, the pounding of memory, of bullets and tree limbs, the pounding of Mother, the pounding of red hair, the pounding of volatile muscles turning rigid in the fleeting world far below, down there, where into my (pounding) ephemeral ear the sidewalk shall whisper the truth BOOM!.