by YZ Chin
Katie started smoothing down her eyebrows with the tips of her middle fingers, something she did when tipsy, uncomfortable, or pensive. I couldn’t tell which one it was that day. Thinking back, maybe she had her own troubles too. Maybe I haven’t been the best friend, since everything happened.
“Okay.” She played along. “Trivia night? It’s real serious and competitive, and you have to know stuff.”
In the end it was all for nothing, because Marlin told me to stop pestering him about being on his own.
“I’m fine. I’m focusing on my own things,” he said, carrying a tray of Amy’s Vegan Organic Rice Mac & Cheeze into the bedroom.
“Can I join you?” I asked, twisting my hands together.
“Hmm. I don’t think you’d be interested,” he said coolly.
I WAS SWAPPING OUT MY PRET EGG SALAD SANDWICH FOR A CHEDDAR and tomato one when Eamon finally picked up. I shuffled in line to pay and cleared my throat.
“Hey, have you seen Marlin?” I tried my best to imitate a casual tone.
“No. What happened? Is he okay?”
I hesitated. “So you haven’t seen him?”
“No, I haven’t seen him.”
“Okay, no big deal,” I said, trying to keep my tone breezy, upbeat even. “Will you let me know if he shows up? Or if he gets in contact with you?”
“What’s going on? Did you guys fight or something?”
“No. I mean, not today.”
“So, what, you fought yesterday? The day before?”
Why did he sound so accusatory? It was true that Eamon and I had never quite hit it off. I found him awkward, his sense of humor juvenile. When I used to tag along to board game nights he hosted, he did nothing to make me feel included. Eventually I started making excuses not to go.
I really could not remember the last time I had seen him.
“You should tell me if there’s something going on,” Eamon pressed.
“I have to go,” I said. I was almost at the front of the line.
I wandered around Madison Square Park after leaving Pret, wending between tourists with cameras and dog walkers wrangling six leashes at a time. Now and then I slowed to tip lentil soup into my mouth straight from the cup. Talking to Eamon had made me feel vaguely guilty. Why was it? Because I wasn’t crying hysterically, wasn’t at my wit’s end?
I’d never been accused of being coldhearted. When we first started dating, Marlin said it was my “emotional generosity” that had drawn him.
“What does that mean? I give you handouts of emotions?” I laughed.
“That’s right. You wear them on your sleeves, and I just pluck them like ripe fruit.” He really did start tugging on my sleeves. Then he leaned in and nibbled my shoulder.
A lone streak of tears. I’d managed that at least. I let it slide into the soup tilted against my face.
Besides the rate of dying, another thing scientists discovered about death is that it can be stopped. Or at least one cause of it, aging, can be. Already certain researchers are making blustery predictions that within our lifetime, science will conquer aging and disrupt dying, rendering it obsolete—barring gunshot, opioid overdose, self-driving car crash, etc. All this points to the possibility of deciphering endings without really understanding their beginnings.
Who was Eamon to judge me? The deterioration of my marriage had happened not all at once, but instead at a rate so slow, it was something like the speed of death.
Some brain damage or stroke patients wake up with their personalities completely changed. Some have even been reported to start speaking like completely different people. For example, a woman who had never left the UK woke up from a stroke with a strong Chinese accent. This is called foreign accent syndrome, as if the patients had emigrated while traveling within their own unconsciousness. What I’m trying to say is, if a huge personality shift seems to happen “all at once,” as after a stroke, then doctors take it seriously. There is a diagnosis and even an acronym (FAS) for it. But if it happens gradually, like Marlin at first just printing out articles about the spirit world, then apparently I’m overreacting if I think he might need help.
It’s the same at the other end of the scientific research spectrum. For believers in demonic possession, a sudden, complete personality change would also be much cause for alarm. There’d be fanfare, religious experts brought in, candles lit, symbols drawn, incantations incanted, and so on. Out, ye devil! Satan, we drive you from us!
So where did that leave us? Marlin’s personality shift was so gradual, there seemed to be no medical or spiritual cause for concern. What is the phrase people like to toss smugly in the face of those with opposing views? “Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” Cuts both ways, doesn’t it?
Before
January 2018
We flew back to Malaysia at the end of January, six or so months before the steam pipe explosion. Usually when we go home it’s a minor cause for celebration, our families having shored up warm feelings toward us in our absence. We usually manage to deplete those feelings over the course of a two-week stay, but during the first few days at least, we’re feted like royalty. Sometimes I think our visits have become, like certain less significant holidays, just another reason for people to overindulge in alcohol and food, and they’re not so much overjoyed to see us as they’re happy for an excuse to depart from daily mundanities. They dress this up as accommodation for us, saying things like “Oh, Americans eat a lot, right, so we can’t let you go hungry.”
In January there was no celebration. Marlin’s father had suddenly passed away from a heart attack, and we paid thousands of dollars each for last-minute tickets to fly back for the funeral.
During the flight, Marlin talked about a version of his dad that would never be. As I held his hand, he circled repeatedly over the plans he’d harbored, secret wishes never before shared with me. In these plans, he had it all figured out. Marlin would get a green card, become a permanent resident, wait the requisite five years before applying for citizenship, study hard and get naturalized, and then sponsor his parents to live with us in America. His dad would have especially enjoyed life there (sometimes Marlin said “here”). With a love of chess both Chinese and Western, he could have whiled away many happy hours at Union Square, challenging other seasoned players sitting on upturned crates. On weekends, we’d all go to Central Park, and Marlin would buy his dad binoculars because he liked to watch birds, even though he also had deteriorating eyesight, unfortunately coupled with a vanity that meant he refused to wear glasses most of the time.
Marlin went on like this while we were airborne. I murmured to let him know I was listening, my heart aching for him. A small part of me selfishly wondered: Why hadn’t I heard him talk about these plans before?
I had few memories of my own father. When I was seven, he gave me a music box that housed a ballerina who would spin in slow circles when I lifted the lid. I cherished that box more than anything in the world. One day the ballerina stopped spinning, and I went crying to my father. He dissected the box, revealing gears and parts hidden under the platform on which the ballerina posed. The discovery of that inner intricacy increased my love for the toy a thousandfold, even as he gently broke it to me that the box was beyond repair; the ballerina would never dance again.
On the plane, thinking about the music box, I felt a surge of love for Marlin. It was as if I’d sewn a piece of my childhood and my own loss directly onto Marlin’s present-day sorrow, connecting our griefs into something shared. Tears in my eyes, I squeezed his hand, and he in turn crushed my fingers. I bit down on the pain.
At the cemetery, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It had been given an auspicious name, the Mountain Villa of Riches and Prosperity. Mummy draped herself over Marlin and wept in front of the fresh grave. With each jagged cry, she deflated a bit more, until she seemed like a shoulder wrap Marlin was wearing. I looked around. No sign of my mother, even though she’d said she�
�d be there as part of the family. The sun beat down and set everything subtly vibrating in the humidity. I tiptoed toward Marlin, asking with my eyes whether he needed me to help support Mummy. He was slouching only a little, his eyes tired and awash in red. His return gaze was blank.
In the distance, a patch of heat shimmered like a portal. I imagined it leading not to another place but to the past. Already it had happened, as people said it would—my country of birth had begun to feel unfamiliar after a decade away.
My mother finally walked up, swiping fingers away from the corners of her eyes.
“I thought I’d go see your Ba as well.” She gestured vaguely at a different section of the cemetery. “Has your father-in-law visited Marlin yet? Visited in his dreams,” she clarified. “It’s a very important sign, especially in the first three days. It’s like this: that is the spirit’s way of letting us know they are at peace.”
“Not now.” I sighed. She had always been a staunch Folk Taoist/Buddhist combination, with emphasis on the Folk part. At home, she had altars perched high up for the Heavenly Grandfather and corresponding floor-level ones for the Lord of the Soil and the Ground, which I was pretty sure didn’t belong in Buddhist canon. This hadn’t bothered me so much when I was young and thought, in the way typical of adolescents, that my mother’s beliefs would never affect me. How wrong I was.
The karmic reincarnation part of Folk Buddhism had a particularly strong hold on my mother’s imagination. Standing right there in front of my father-in-law’s body, she started to speculate what fate awaited him in his next life.
“Maybe he’ll be a rich and successful import/export businessman?” she pondered, lifting her ionic-straightened hair off her shoulders to expose her prominent collarbones. “He was so kind to beggars, and he loved to watch those travel shows on TV.”
She went on with a string more of occupational guesses, which I tuned out. She’d been spinning past life stories as long as I could remember, many of them constructed to explain away aspects of my personality that she disliked. For example, she once told me I had been a cruel tormentor of animals in one of my past lives. I started small, she said, nothing more serious than a few well-placed kicks to the heads of passing stray dogs and cats, but as I got older I developed into a full-blown psychopath who impaled birds on tree trunks and skinned rabbits alive, and so on—I’ll spare you. The gist is that the animal cruelty story helps her come to grips with the fact that, in this life, I decided to be a vegetarian. Under the rules of karmic reincarnation, if you do bad things in your past lives, you have to atone or suffer for them in later lives. To her, not eating meat is definitely a form of suffering.
Storm clouds passed above the Mountain Villa of Riches and Prosperity, collapsing the shimmering portal of heat. I blinked. My mother was telling yet another past life story now, seemingly about me, which she called the banana tree spirit story. I readied my eyes for rolling, but the more I listened, the more my scalp tingled as awe and pity flooded through me. The story was about a beautiful teenage girl, promised in marriage by her parents to the highest bidder but secretly seeing a different boy on the side. As my mother described the girl’s ultimate fate, I blinked back tears. I turned away to wipe them when my mother finally paused for breath.
I chalked it up to understandable emotional vulnerability at the funeral, though I would change my mind. Later, I would come to believe that there was something about the banana tree spirit story itself, something about the shame it held up to the light.
After
Day Two (Thursday)
“Hey, just emailed you part three of Gone with the Galactic Superwind,” Josh said when I returned from lunch. He had a half-eaten prime rib sandwich next to him, balanced on top of a decorative ashtray printed with the words ATLANTIC CITY.
“Why do you want to be a writer anyway?” I asked. The phone call to Eamon had agitated me.
“Because it’s dope, yo! I wanna be like George R. R. Martin. Except not fat, obviously.”
Was it me, or did he give my figure a meaningful look? I knew I shouldn’t have worn the ill-fitting purple sweaterdress. It was simply the first thing I’d grabbed in the morning, groggy from lack of sleep.
The first time I realized I was fat was at Buddhist camp. I was twelve, and the list of items forbidden to me by my mother included bras with underwire, motorcycles, makeup, and coffee. My father was dead by then, and so unable to take my side.
At camp during mealtimes, we sat at long picnic-style tables and thanked Buddha for the food and drinks arrayed neatly in front of us. Eyes closed, head bowed, lips chanting an old language in rhyme, I got my first taste of complicated, grown-up desire. The breaths I took in as we circulated our gratitude to Buddha, up high and hidden from view by sloping roofs, carried with its atoms the gritty aroma of coffee. The whole time I was verbally being thankful for the plenitude before me, an internal struggle was raging. Was it so wrong to drink coffee with Buddha’s blessing, against my parent’s wishes? Surely, in the hierarchy of authority, Buddha was top dog?
The last echoes of the whole camp chanting in unison died away. I opened my eyes. There it was right in front of me, the contraband: black coffee that looked thick and solid somehow, filling up a translucent plastic jug that did nothing to lessen its serious, adult allure. I formed a fist around the jug handle and jerked upward as if the coffee was weightless. I was expecting something ethereal because I’d never had a wish come true before. But of course that jug of black liquid had mass in the real world. My grip wavered under the unexpected weight, and the jug swayed, splashing puddles of coffee around my section of the long mess table. A few drops landed in my tin mug, pooling against one edge.
“Watch it, fatty! No brains, is it!” a boy yelled.
I hastily banged the jug back on the table. More coffee sloshed over.
“Wow, ugly bitch is so useless she’s going to waste all our food!”
I looked up at the boy who had hissed at me from across the table. “You’re not supposed to be mean at Buddhist camp,” I said.
“And you’re not supposed to be fat,” he jeered. “Buddha achieved nirvana by fasting to death, so you how?”
I had no retort for that. I held up the tin mug, its lip against my lip, and waited. Forever later, a droplet washed onto my tongue, and it was bitter.
Perhaps you can see why I developed a resistance to Buddhism and, with it, my mother’s beliefs about karmic reincarnation. And I bet you thought Buddhist camp would be an oasis of peace and Zen, right?
But still, sometimes, early on quiet spring mornings, the radiator in our New York apartment dings just once, and it sounds exactly like the tock of a wooden fish in the hands of a monk.
I SLOGGED THROUGH THE REST OF THE WORKDAY, SPENDING MOST OF my time on Google Street View inspecting all available angles of the building housing Cachi I/O. As far as Manhattan coworking spaces went, it was standard fare. The facade was grand but bland, featuring weathered gargoyles and a lintel that would be impressive, were it not mostly obscured by scaffolding. I peered one by one at the faces blurred into gray smudges, even though I knew very well that it was pointless; any unlikely photographic evidence I found of Marlin here would be from months, if not years, ago.
Pushing back slightly from my desk, I called Marlin again, and emailed, and texted. Perhaps it was a sign of my pessimism that I didn’t go somewhere more private to call. I wasn’t expecting his voice mailbox to be restored, and I was correct.
Phil stopped by at some point in the afternoon, much to my alarm, while I gazed unseeing at my computer. “Hey, tester. I heard you wanted to talk to me?”
I stared at his shiny forehead, his scraggly beard, unable to speak. Sputters of laughter rose from behind Josh’s tower of monitors.
“What’s so funny?” Phil smiled.
“Oh, nothing, just the look on her face.” Josh stood up, grinning right at me.
“Whose face?” Phil asked. “Edwina?”
Josh coughed. �
�Some girl in a video I was watching.”
“Something wrong?” Phil turned to me.
“I was actually about to leave,” I said. “I need to take care of something at home.”
“All right, see you later,” he said, rapping a knuckle against my desk.
Before
October 2017
Thanks for saying I’m not ugly. Marlin used to tell me that too. He said kids are cruel and childhood bullies should not have such an outsize impact on the rest of my life. Then again, you’ve seen me only on the app and not in person, so maybe you should withhold judgment for now.
After we came back from our honeymoon, Marlin and I wondered whether to get a cat. Marlin is (was?) more of a dog person; he’s charmed by bigger, fluffier breeds like huskies and Samoyeds. I took advantage of this preference to persuade him that a cat was the more ethical choice, because our apartment was small and a big dog would quickly become restless and feel fenced in.
He admitted that he could find no fault with my logic, but I could tell that the emotional resonance wasn’t there. He had one hand lifted, absentmindedly fluffing the back of his hair, like he was fantasizing about petting a goofball dog. As a joke, I grabbed a pair of scissors and made a life-size cutout of a cat from construction paper. I posed the jagged-edged cat next to him on our couch, telling him to try imagining having a cat around the place.
“Maybe this will change your mind. You’ll get so used to her presence that she’ll become real to you,” I said, pleased with my crude work.
Marlin seemed unimpressed. But the next morning, as I stumbled bleary-eyed into the bathroom, I nearly sat on the cat cutout posed on the toilet seat. I huffed out belly laughs so big I could smell my own stink of unbrushed morning breath.
After that it was game on. Sometimes our paper cat would be perched right in front of Marlin’s computer, obscuring the screen. Other times she snuck under my pillow, with only a little nub of a paw or tail tip sticking out to let me know she was there. Occasionally she went missing, and I would almost even forget about her, until she surprised me, waiting in the freezer.
