Miles from Nowhere

by Nami Mun

  “Is Mrs. McCommon home?” I asked.

  We were in his garage, looking for tools to pry open the plywood.

  “No,” he said, rummaging through a metal chest. “She had cancer.”

  He spoke casually, as if reading off a grocery list. I didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s okay,” he added. “She’s not dead.”

  I halfheartedly sifted through an open cardboard box. “Is she all right?”

  From the chest he pulled out a hammer and pondered its dimensions. “She’s probably fine,” was all he said, and I let his answer be.

  The front half of the garage was a jumble of boxes, laundry baskets, and crates. Some mounds reached my waist and none were labeled or in any way organized. The rear of the garage was a different story. A skyline of neatly stacked items almost eclipsed the entire back wall—items I didn’t think anyone collected. Like the white foam trays that come with supermarket meat. Or bundles of old newspaper, every single one wrapped in the Sunday comics. Or empty boxes of Kleenex. Slouching in a corner were roughly twenty paper bags, all of them labeled and brimming with throwaways, like lightbulbs, blue plastic razors, curled tubes of toothpaste, and—maybe the most confusing—clumps of used tissue. That every item was categorized and kept so tidy was what stunned me.

  I turned around. Mr. McCommon was still on his knees, now leaning over a different box. His jacket was open, and poking up from an interior pocket was a pudgy cream-colored envelope, the return address inked in calligraphy. It seemed on the verge of falling out, not that he noticed. An orange work light hooked to a beam tanned the crown of his head while blurring his face in shadow, but I could still make out the absolute determination in his eyes. And in his arms, which were elbow-deep in the box, swirling items around in a mad search. Why he was so set on helping me I didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t, either. I picked a crate and started digging. I wanted to ask why he saved the things he saved but figured that if I felt uneasy asking, then he’d feel uneasy answering. I instead asked if he knew what had happened to all of our stuff.

  “The bank foreclosed on your house. I’m guessing they sold everything.”

  I flipped through an old magazine. “I wonder what they got for my junior-high yearbook.”

  He laughed through his teeth.

  “What am I looking for again?” I asked.

  “A crowbar, or anything that behaves like a crowbar.”

  My hands touched tangled stockings, tubes of lipstick, a blond wig, empty tubs of Noxzema, and other remains, but nothing resembling a tool.

  “Mr. McCommon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Here, slide that over,” he said, pointing to a laundry basket filled with a hodgepodge of blankets and batteries and music boxes. I nudged it over with my foot.

  “How do you remember us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mother and me. What did we look like to you?”

  Without looking up he said, “Troubled. Just like everybody else.”

  “You and Mrs. McCommon always seemed—”

  “Goddamn it!” He chucked something back into the basket and stood up. “I know I have a crowbar somewhere in here.” With hands on hips, he looked down the driveway and shook his head as if disagreeing with the trash cans sitting by the curb. The clouds hung low, and the sun was failing. Across the street, a porch light blinked twice before coming on, and that slight hesitation made me wonder if I should leave. The dust in the garage powdered my throat, and plus, I didn’t think I needed to see the dying insides of my childhood home. Some things were best kept in the dark. Like my past. Like Mr. McCommon’s collections.

  “Try over there.” Mr. McCommon pointed to a skinny workbench that stood against the right side of the garage. Blue milk crates took up most of the counter. One was filled with kitchen utensils. Another a mayhem of hair-brushes, combs, a blow-dryer, leather gloves, and a pocket-sized Bible, the same kind my mother had kept in her purse. A lime-green pleather cover with The New Testament inscribed in gold. The color matched Mr. McCommon’s tracksuit, and it came to me then that I’d never seen him in anything but gray. I picked up the mini Bible, opened to a page to smell it but the scent didn’t remind me of my mother’s hand cream.

  “Finally.” Mr. McCommon stood behind me, holding a crowbar as if it were a torch. “Come on. Let’s go break into your house.”

  The moon was full, its light widening the sky around it. Mr. McCommon carried the hammer and the crowbar. I carried a flashlight. The neighborhood was quiet; he was quiet. I could hear the scrapes of his tracksuit and the long, distant sighs of the expressway as we drifted across my mother’s driveway, her yard, and faced the kitchen window.

  “Stand back,” he said, pushing up his sleeves. At the lower right side of the plywood, he wedged in the flat end of the crowbar and started hammering it in. “I can’t see,” he said, and I aimed the flashlight at his hands. With a third of the rod now jammed behind the wood, he dropped the hammer, gripped and re-gripped the crook of the crowbar, braced his foot against the aluminum siding, and pulled. “I remember when the workers boarded up the house,” he said, grunting with every effort.

  “Do you want some help?”

  “They didn’t mess around.” He looked like he was being strangled, the flesh around his eyes and mouth ballooning.

  “I can pull with you, if you want.”

  “Big . . . guys, with big . . . nail guns.” He changed to an underhanded grip and planted his foot higher on the siding. “But this crowbar . . . should do the trick.” He growled and pulled with renewed strength but the plywood budged less than an inch.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.

  “Why not.” He hammered in the crowbar farther. “Sometimes it’s good to break the rules. Let the neighbors call the cops, I don’t care.” He yanked harder, and this time his arms began to tremble. I thought they might pop off.

  I hadn’t even thought about the neighbors. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  He gritted his teeth, his face frozen in pain, and then as if the sound had been boiling in his stomach for years, he let out a scream so loud and so long, I was sure he’d grown another vocal cord.

  “Goddamn it!” he screamed, and picked up the hammer, held it like an ax, and for reasons unclear to me, he began clobbering the wood.

  “Mr. McCommon?”

  “Not now!” he barked. He was exploding. His arms swung wildly above his head though his face appeared to be doing all the work. Deep, guttural sounds spilled from his crooked lips with every slam, but as wild as his strokes were, the plywood didn’t give. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled, and swung harder, out of control. The sound of metal whacking wood struck my temples.

  “We really don’t have to do this,” I told him.

  “—Yes

  “—I

  “—do,” he said, and delivered maybe five more swings, each one making a crescent-shaped dimple, each one slowing the next one down, until he finally and simply released the hammer, the head thudding the ground. He folded his body, his palms clutched his thighs, and with every gasp his chest whistled.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Am I okay?” He laughed, maybe for too long, and the sheer frustration of his laughter clung to my skin. He slumped to the ground, leaned back against the aluminum siding, and closed his eyes. “She said I was boring.”

  I turned the flashlight off and sidled up next to him.

  “I’m the one who watched her going bald. I changed her sheets when she couldn’t get to the bathroom in time. I fed her Jell-O, I drained her bedsores. I’m the one who gave her sponge baths. Me. And after all that, she says I’m too dull.”

  From where we sat, we could see the orange, square glow that came from his garage.

  “She didn’t want to die married to me.”

  “But she didn’t die,” I said.

  “Now she’s marrying some merchant marine.�
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  “But she’s still alive,” I said, as loud as I had intended. When the words left me, all I wanted was to run to his garage, pull down the door, bury myself under batteries and blankets and lipsticks and rubber bands, and sleep inside his city of remains.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” he whispered.

  I felt a tiny collapsing in my chest and it took me a moment to correctly identify the pang, not as grief, but as jealousy. I hadn’t loved my mother the way he had loved his wife. I had left her when she needed me most, and in the end, she died, in a car, completely alone with nothing but the sound of metal crushing her. I couldn’t grieve for her, not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t deserve to. I looked at Mr. McCommon, his hands smothering his face, his chest flinching. He had no idea that grief was a reward. That it only came to those who were loyal, to those who loved more than they were capable of. He had a garage, full of her belongings, and all I had was my guilt. It took on its own shape and smell and nestled in the pit of my body, and it would sleep and play and walk with me for decades to come.

  For a long while we stayed just as we were, listening to the air, letting the expressway mourn our loss. I asked if I could take the green pocket-sized Bible.

  “I still miss her,” he said, like he was breathing, and I didn’t have the heart to repeat myself.

  And then, without discussion, we both stood up and tried the window again. Between the two of us, it took just a few minutes to pry off a corner of the wood, only to discover that another plank was boarding up the window from the inside. We never got in, and somehow that seemed appropriate. On our way back to his garage, Mr. McCommon looked up at his bedroom window, which was dark like the rest of his house. “I even miss seeing her sick,” he said, and that seemed to me a truth I could hold on to about my mother, a place to begin.

  Acknowledgments

  For their monumental support, I would like to thank the Nor-ton Island Residency, MacDowell Colony, Corporation of Yaddo, Key West Literary Seminar, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hopwood Awards Committee, and the University of Michigan MFA program, where I was fortunate to be mentored by the ridiculously generous Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Michael Byers, and Nick Delbanco.

  I am in awe of my editor, Megan Lynch, and my agent, Amy Williams. Their unflagging commitment to this book feels more like love than business. My gratefulness to Barney Rosset, Julie Barer, P. J. Mark, Jim Houston, Lee Montgomery, Alex Chee, Steve McManus, Bonnie Mahler, Tom Farber, Sandra Gilbert, Marcela Valdes, Rachel Kash, Oyamo, Margaret Dean, Chris Hebert, and all my mates at the University of Michigan. Thanks also to the gang at Schmidt’s Tobacco Trading Co. & Pub for always saving a seat for me and my laptop. Special gratitude to Kevin Jones for years of insightful feedback, and to Mitchell and Lucia Rose for loving me like a daughter.

  The (Ashby Avenue) Groop gave me what every writer needs: other writers to admire and learn from. I feel especially indebted to John Beckman, Andy Berry, MJ Deery, Jen Deitz, Christian Divine, Bridget Hoida, Marco and Megan Morrone, Nick Petrulakis, and Jenn Stroud, who have read, reread, and argued about nearly every story in this book.

  And most of all, my love and gratitude to Augustus Rose for never refusing a late-night “emergency” reading.

  And to my sister, whose love can’t be translated into words.

  “Shelter” first appeared in Witness, and then in Pushcart Prize XXXI. “Club Orchid” first appeared, in different form, in Evergreen Review. “On the Bus” first appeared in The Iowa Review. “With a Boy” (formerly “Blue Fly”) appeared, in different form, in Tin House. “What We Had” (formerly “Year of the Fire Dragon”) first appeared, in different form, in Eleven Eleven.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written” by Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976-1986 © 1981, 1987 by Margaret Atwood (U.S., Houghton Mifflin Co.); Selected Poems 1966-1984 © 1981, 1990 by Margaret Atwood (Canada, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.); Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 © 1998 by Margaret Atwood (UK, Virago Press).