by Nami Mun
“Bet you think you know a lot of things.”
“You’re trying to scare me straight. But don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”
“I don’t give a shit what you do,” he said. “Your PD’s the one who recommended you for counseling, not me.”
“Well, I didn’t want counseling, so . . .”
We walked down yet another endless hallway, the silence between us like a third wall. I had disappointed him—someone was disappointed in me—and for reasons I didn’t fully understand back then, this made me happy in a quiet sort of way. When we got back to the cell, I told him I was sorry. He refused to notice me. He uncuffed me, put me in without a word, and called out another name from his clipboard. A few seconds later, he and the girl were gone.
The holding tank now smelled like old mayonnaise. It felt as though I’d been gone for days until I heard the girl with orange hair still hollering about her son. Instead of screaming into the pay phone, she now stood in the center of the cell and preached to the women, even though most of them were asleep and leaning on one another like fallen dominoes.
“Why do people have to mess with my son?” she asked us. I settled into a spot on the floor, by the back again. “I mean, that’s my son. I gave birth to him. He came out of my vagina. That makes him mine. That’s what that means. You got something coming out of your vagina, that’s all yours.”
“She’s got a point,” somebody said.
“Amen,” somebody else said.
Whenever I got released from jail I wanted to do things I’d never done before. Like go see a wrestling match or hitchhike across the country or lie down in a stream at the Bronx Botanical Gardens and make the water bend around me. This feeling lasted about forty-five minutes, the time it took for me to be released, reclaim my things, and walk across the street to a parking lot where I knew my public defender would be, waiting in his car.
Louis leaned over and opened the passenger door. I got in, and immediately he raised the armrest between us and lowered the radio volume. The car smelled of fries and pinecones.
“Here, dig in,” he said, passing me a McDonald’s bag.
I told him thanks and asked if he got me ketchup.
“It should be in the bottom.” He reached into the bag himself, pulled out a packet, tore it open with his teeth, and squirted the ketchup on the fries for me.
“I got something else for you.” He held out a small plastic bag and I told him he should open it since my hands were full. With a sheepish grin he pulled out four bottles of polish: Ruby Red, Pink Frost, Coral Blue, and Plum.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, but was glad that he did. I kissed him on the cheek and asked if he was ready.
He said he was.
I set my burger on the dashboard and took off my sneakers.
“Don’t forget the socks.”
I peeled them off as slowly as I would a scab and handed them over. He smelled them, quietly, then placed one on his lap and one on the dashboard. I clicked my seat back, balanced the burger and fries on my belly, and put my feet up on the dash, right on top of the sock. Louis sighed. Like he’d been saved from danger. He never touched them. And he never touched himself. He just stared at them, always on the dash, always with an expression that was somewhere between grief and curiosity. Sometimes I thought he might cry, which made me wonder if he actually enjoyed our meetings. If he liked himself during, and after.
I finished my burger. I thanked him for the polish and told him I had to go.
“Hold on.” He reached for his briefcase in the back and pulled out a copy of a police report. It was about my mom, on the night of her death. Only then did I realize that I had forgotten to ask him how she had died. I took the report. Two pages of the accident. One page from my father, giving his statement. I didn’t know if I should thank Louis or punch him in the face for giving me information I didn’t want to own. I did neither and got out of the car.
This was the way I saw it.
Sometime after our meeting at the coffee shop, my mother and my father reconciled. He came back to her, to our house. He had his suitcase with him, which he placed on their bed before stepping into the shower. My mother, who probably didn’t know what to do with all that energy that comes with winning someone back, opened up his suitcase to unpack his belongings. She couldn’t have predicted her reaction. She couldn’t have prepared herself to see his undershirts and underwear crisply folded, socks rolled into potatoes, and pants ironed and folded in threes. In seeing these items, she recognized that only a woman could’ve packed them with such care. And the thought of another woman having touched his underthings shot her to insanity. As soon as my father stepped out of the shower, my mother threw him out for what must have been the sixth time in their marriage. But as he was driving away, she changed her mind, as she sometimes did, and got into her car to go after him. She didn’t even make it out of our neighborhood. Three blocks away she ran a red light and a truck crashed into her cheekbones, shoulders, and pelvis, finally breaking her into the pieces she’d always felt inside.
Years later, when I bumped into my father on the subway, none of this came up. He placed his combination briefcase between his legs and gripped the railing above him, his body turned to the man to his right. They talked seriously, in Korean, and he didn’t see me for a long while. They both had on suits, and his looked thin and silky—tiny bits of glitter lived inside the fabric. I was sitting one seat to his left. Our knees were inches apart. He smelled familiar, and maybe it was this that compelled me to tug on his pants and wave up to him. He looked genuinely stunned for a second, and then asked, “How are you? You doing good?” I couldn’t decide what to be upset about first. The fact that he was speaking to me in English or that he’d asked these questions as though I were a business acquaintance. I told him I was fine.
He didn’t introduce me to the man beside him and instead talked about himself, how he was in real estate, how the business was booming, how he had recently donated five thousand dollars to his church, the largest church in Queens. At the start of each sentence he would look at me, but for the majority of his speeches, he would turn and address the man. It was clear he was trying to impress this man, and that made me feel pity for my father but not the kind I could enjoy. He called himself the mayor of Koreatown and went on about how people revered him. When he ate at restaurants, everyone came by to bow and pay him respect, like the old days in Korea, he told us, his voice trumping the sounds of the subway. He wanted every commuter to hear, these complete strangers who probably didn’t understand a single word of what he was saying because of his accent. I told him that I was happy for him, and that his English was improving.
When the train slowed, he and the man grabbed their belongings. My father sidestepped toward the doors and told me to call him if I needed anything. He tapped my shoulder while saying this, and I wanted to grab ahold of his hand and tell him really simple things, like how good it was to see him and how I had forgotten the smell of Old Spice. But his hand left and the doors opened and before my words could find my throat, he and his combination briefcase walked off the train without giving me his phone number. We never once mentioned my mother.
What We Had
And one day I woke up with Benny next to me and, next to him, a girl I didn’t know. We were living in a motel where black wires snaked down from a hole in the ceiling, guiding the rain onto the foot of our bed. The girl could’ve been anybody. A teller, a waitress, a cashier from the A&P waiting for a bus in the storm. Anyone willing to drown with him. I sat up and looked for their gear. It was on the floor, soaking in a Dixie cup, the water a little pink from the blood. Q-tip heads. Rubbing alcohol. A large soupspoon with the handle wrapped in a Band-Aid. Things we used to share. The room smelled of warm vinegar. Somewhere under our blankets the radio sang low, muffled enough for me to think that the sound was coming from somewhere in my chest.
She was blond like the others and he was hugging her, wrapping hi
s long white body around hers in a tight braid, wanting to dream her dreams. She was smiling. She had thin skin. I could see the system of veins on the back of her hand. And the black hole just above her wrist. A pencil mark. A start of a scab. His back was to me and I took that to mean something. I reached over them across the bed to grab his cigarettes and a box of matches on the nightstand. I coughed, cleared my throat twice, and rattled the tiny box like I was trying to guess what was inside it. When he didn’t wake, I struck a match and dropped it in his ear.
He shot up, slapping the side of his face, over and over, like a dog. I slipped out of bed without saying a word.
“Fuck, what was that?” He rubbed his eyes and then stared blankly at the TV before rubbing his eyes some more.
“Maybe you were dreaming,” I said.
Outside, the rain tried to break through the glass. I put on all the clothes I owned—two pairs of socks, three tees, a pair of pants, two sweaters, and my jacket.
“I’m not coming back,” I said.
He lay back down with eyes already shut, pulled the girl in closer, draped her arm across his cracker-thin chest, and their bodies took over the bed and the pillow that had held the shape of me.
I left without slamming the door.
It was sunny and raining. Blades of white light cut through the clouds and shined on the glassy tubes of rain as they streaked the air and tapped my jean jacket. I stood across the street from the motel and counted to twenty, and then forty, to the beat of the neon sign blinking next to our window. PSYCHIC, the sign said, again and again. I counted past sixty without much thought and went up to a hundred. Twice. First in English, and then Korean. Benny didn’t come out for me. I knew he wouldn’t but I still wanted to make sure. Two-legged umbrellas crossed the street, threading themselves between cars and dump trucks and vans that were honking at a bus making a lazy turn. My hair felt stiff and cold. Maybe I would’ve waited years for Benny if the weather had been different, if I hadn’t looked down and noticed the rainwater rushing against the curb, and the Barbie head, her hair splayed like wings above her face, stuck behind a to-go carton lying on its side. The water slid over her eyes and nose and lips that kissed the carton, until the weight of all that came before her propelled her down Hemming Street. I started walking. It was as good a direction as any.
The traffic lights flashed red and yellow as I wandered past liquor signs, plastic cakes, trees of discount shoes, and faded hairstyle posters behind barred windows, and soon the storefronts made way for a deserted lot, a tire shop, an abandoned gas station, and a White Castle that stood like a tooth on that block of browns. Through the windowpane I saw a guy sitting alone at the counter with his shoulders slumped and his head bowed over a coffee cup as if it were raining inside and only on him. I kept on, past bus stop shelters, a porn shop, a second-story apartment window taped with pages from a coloring book, until I walked through a heavy wooden door and stepped into O’Brien’s.
The darkness always surprised me. At the bar I uncrumpled my last ten dollars onto the counter and gave Henry my order, not ashamed of the morning hour. My jacket was soaked. I took it off and shook out the rain.
“Still flooding out there?” Henry asked.
I told him it was.
“I love it. Gets the scum off the streets,” he said, and took a swig of beer.
Henry was always a pint ahead of everybody. That, along with the fat on him, made him move slow, but I didn’t mind because he also counted slow when pouring my drink. Three fingers, no ice. O’Brien’s was a cold tomb with no music or darts or Pac-Man, but the smell of sticky beer and Henry’s cigar warmed the place in spirit. On the door, a small diamond-shaped window funneled the bar’s only daylight onto Henry’s balding head and the lineup of liquor stacked behind him. Above the bottles hung a huge sign made of scrap wood: God has a soft spot for all who enter. When you leave you’re on your own. Two old souls who could’ve been twins slouched at the other end of the bar, picking up their chins long enough to raise their pints at me. As if I were one of them. I’m just sitting here, I don’t live here, I thought, and smiled and returned the toast. Then I realized I wasn’t living anywhere now.
The front door opened and let in a slice of light. Before I could turn to see who it was, Henry was punching the air with his cigar. “Get outta here, you crazy fuck.”
A skinny old man stood by the doorway. “Have you seen my Mary?” he asked, a quiet panic trapped in his voice. He had on a shriveled suit that was gray and drippy, like his beard, like his long and clumpy hair. He looked cold and confused. I had no room for this man’s confusion, and I might’ve ignored him except that on the crook of his elbow he carried a green grocery basket, just big enough for the wet dog shivering in it. The dog howled something long and meaningful until the old man eased him with a pat on the head. His fingers were arthritic, marbles stuck in each joint. “Have you seen my Mary?” he whispered, just to me this time.
I told him no, and that I didn’t know who she was. Disappointed with my answer, the dog lay down, and it was in the way he fell, a partial collapse onto his side, that made me look away.
“You wanna see me count, is that it?” Henry flipped open a hinged slab of the counter, and that was enough of a threat. The door closed and the wedge of light disappeared. Henry plugged the cigar back into his mouth and returned to his pals, boasting about all the harm he would’ve inflicted on the old man. I drank and tried to picture who Mary could be. Maybe she was just another dog. I hoped it wasn’t. Dogs look so scared when they’re lost, or worse, when they’re hungry.
Don’t feed him, Benny had said to me when I wanted to share our lunch with a stray. This was a few months back. A black mutt had followed a trail that led him to us sitting on the sidewalk, in front of the motel, devouring a small bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken I’d bought for us. We hadn’t eaten in I don’t know how long.
“I can see every rib,” I said, touching the dog’s side. His coat reminded me of dry grass.
“All you’d be doing is giving him false hope.” Benny grabbed the dog’s snout. “When it’s over, it’s over, and you know that, don’t ya, pal?”
The mutt didn’t fight Benny’s grip. Instead he stuck his tongue out sideways and licked Benny’s hand, the look in his eyes flickering from joy to uncertainty, not knowing whether to be grateful for the touch or to run for his life.
“I’m going to feed him,” I said.
Benny shook his head but put his hand out, as if to introduce the dog to me. “Go ahead. You’re free to do whatever you want.”
On the ground I put out the last two pieces, a leg and a thigh, and the dog quickly cracked the bones using his side teeth. It felt good to watch him eat. As if I was the one getting full. Benny went up to our room and I followed, keeping the feeling to myself for the rest of the night and falling asleep with it.
And the good feeling was still there the next morning when Benny and I woke up early to go on a mission to score. We got out of bed, slapped on some clothes, and stepped out onto the quiet street. The sky was still black and secretive, holding back its light from the buildings, the manhole covers, and all the sidewalks, including the one where the dog lay. I almost tripped over him. We were about a block from the motel. He was on his side, a little dish of blood under his mouth.
“Chicken bones. It tears up the insides,” Benny said, and walked on ahead. “I told you not to feed him.”
I touched his chest to see if I could feel something alive. I wanted to make sure, but really, what I wanted was time to understand.
“You coming?” Benny called, without turning around.
“You want some gum?” Henry asked one of the regulars.
O’Brien’s had a lunch special: a free piece of Dentyne with every pint so guys could return to work or to their wives smelling fresh and optimistic. The weather let up. I couldn’t see it as much as I could tell by the sound—tires cutting a thinner skin of rain. Benny would be awake, his hands smoothing the g
irl’s pale body. This thought made me want to run back to the motel and calmly explain to the blonde that Benny was mine. That his hands were mine, that his skin and nails and kidneys were mine. And then I would explain the same to Benny. I stared at the front door and downed my drink but it didn’t give me the courage I needed. That was when Tati walked in.
Pink cowboy boots, a rabbit-fur coat, full waxy red lips.
“He’s still alive if that’s what you wanna know,” Tati said, tossing her coat onto the bar and taking up the stool next to me.
Tati was Chinese, a real one from China, and the guys at the bar liked to call us twins because we were both skinny Orientals. Beyond that, we didn’t look much alike. Her hair was short and punk with streaky bangs that sliced her forehead, all of this a contrast to her soft, heart-shaped face. My face was a block, and my hair was long and crooked because I chopped it myself with arts-and-crafts scissors. Tati hadn’t been around in a while, so I was happy to see her, especially since she always had money.
“Am I in the papers yet?” she asked Henry, which made him chuckle and roll his cigar in his mouth. After ordering Baileys with whipped cream, she pulled out her rabbit’s foot key chain from her skirt pocket and set it on the bar. Tati was the most superstitious person I’d ever met, always petting her rabbit’s foot or handing out acorns to people having a bad day. She also placed an acorn on the counter after each drink until she had three. When ordering her fourth drink she’d shove all the acorns back into her pocket and start over because she avoided four of anything. Four was death.
Henry put her drink down. “So. You really toss a cleaver at your old man?”
From her coat pocket she whipped out a switchblade and opened it with a click. “Vinh gave it to me. Taught me how to throw it, too.”
Tati then turned to me and explained that the cops had come out to her house the night before because she had thrown a knife at her father—all this over Vinh, a Vietnamese gangster the father had forbidden her to date. While Henry examined the knife, Tati poured a waterfall of sugar into her drink. A few sprinkles landed on the counter. She swept them onto her palm and threw a pinch over her shoulder.
