The Death of Alexander the Great

Abstract

The Death of Alexander the Great Zak Salih (bio) When they pass Mr. Nestor’s house, Mike asks his parents to turn on WMMS. A boy again, at twenty-one, in the back-seat of his parents’ car, his own car in the front drive with its broken transmission, asking Mom and Dad to play some music. Through their cigarette smoke, he watches the morning release the Cleveland suburbs from sleep. Cars and buses flash silver on their way downtown. Trees lie wrecked on lawns after last week’s storm. A mackerel cat stalks a finch along the eaves of the corner store. Mike’s mother turns the radio on. “—of 271 American lives lost this week, a stark report that—” She quickly changes the station. “—remains had recently arrived in New York City for her funeral, barred to reporters and the public, who nevertheless lined up to pay respects to the woman they said could make even the most rock-hearted man cry.” “So sad,” his mother says. She blows smoke out into the morning and starts to whistle “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Dead soldiers. Dead film stars. No one, on this station or WMMS or any other, says a word about Alexander, as if the brief mention Mike caught on the television news last night, between a segment on his brother and other hometown war heroes and sick elephants at the Metroparks Zoo, had been a mixed signal from another state, another universe. An old woman out for a morning walk in Trumbull Park had found the body left like litter in the meadow. A body later identified as Alexander Rush. Mike said nothing when he heard the name. He sat on the sofa and sucked his cigarette dry and remembered Alexander’s advice. Never look sad. They won’t pay for a crybaby. [End Page 107] The police mentioned guns, gangs, heroin. Mike’s father, high on his oldest son’s celebrity, scoffed. A woman held shaking hands to her face, spoke of a son she felt she’d never known, and Mike tried to find Alexander in the gaps between her fingers. During the weather, the lotto numbers, Mike thought of the cautionary films from high school about what heroin did to a body. The bleary eyes, the needle marks like bug bites, the inexplicable rage and paranoia. But Alexander hadn’t been angry or suspicious. His arms had been clean of everything save the scattered moles Mike liked to count when he was too nervous to look into Alexander’s eyes. Alexander had no need for heroin in Trumbull Park. The other boys, maybe. But not Alexander. Breathing in the backdraft of his parents’ exhaust, Mike yearns for his own pack of cigarettes, which he’s forgotten at home, which he can see on the garish yellow felt of the armchair in his bedroom. Sure, he could bum one of his mother’s White Horses or his father’s Solents, but Alexander had exclusively smoked Rothmans, which means Mike exclusively smokes Rothmans. To do otherwise, especially this morning, would feel sacrilegious. Goddamn cigarettes on the goddamn chair, he thinks. His mother brought the ugly beast home last year from an estate sale. A chair for listening to your music, she had said. Mike had seen right through the gift, of course, all the way down to her desperate desire to keep him safe from the violent world to which she’d handed over George, now off flying his planes somewhere in Southeast Asia. It was broken, too, the chair. The springs had long lost their tension, the weak wood slats on its underside felt ready to snap. Still, the chair wasn’t without its use. One evening, when Alexander was a no-show at the school, Mike had come home to his room, turned up WMMS, and pulled the slats out of the chair, one by one, like rotten teeth. Here, under a stack of bath towels, he stored the shoebox that held the money he’d made, his mother’s gift an illicit bank for the illicit income he had hoped to one day present to Alexander like an offering before a king...