by YZ Chin
“Now think about your mother.”
I made a face.
“Just follow the instructions for now. It’ll make sense later. That’s how it worked for me. I kept an open mind and went step by step.”
His words were vague, almost meaningless, but I wanted to please him. So I tried. At first there was nothing. Then I did picture her. Not as she’d last appeared—chin forward, tattooed eyebrows so sharp they defied the blurry quality of our video chat—but as she must have seemed to me in my childhood, a towering figure.
“What do you want?” She bent over me, smiling. Overhead, a gecko crawled across the ceiling. “Honey Stars or Koko Krunch?”
I stared, fascinated, wondering if the gecko would fall on her beautiful head. What would she do then? I couldn’t imagine.
“You don’t know what you want?” Her smile contracted. Her hands rose from her knees to settle, braced, against her waist.
“You can ask your question now. About your mother, why she’s like that.” Marlin’s voice cut through my memory. I suddenly noticed that his grasp was much tighter. He was guiding my balled-up hand to swing the noodle-like object, at first in a hypnotic left-right arc, then in a more complicated rhythm that eluded me.
“Who’s answering the question?” I asked. “You?” Marlin was acting like some kind of strange, authoritative therapist. It made me uneasy.
“No.” A pause. “Think of it as . . . a presence that has higher insight.”
“What do you mean?” I opened my eyes to search his face. “Like a god?”
“Keep your eyes closed!” Marlin looked as dismayed as I felt. For a moment, I thought this was good, a sign that we were in sync. Then my hand dropped and thudded against the dining table. He’d abruptly let go.
“Ow.” I rubbed my hand, pouting.
“I can’t continue if you don’t take this seriously.”
“It’s hard to do that when you’re being all mysterious! What is this, some kind of religious thing?”
Marlin said nothing, his expression rigid. I turned to see what my hand had been holding and swinging. I just wanted to understand. But Marlin leapt into action, sweeping items off the table in big, exaggerated motions, cradling them so I couldn’t get a clear view.
“You don’t get it. And it’s okay, that’s fine, but you could at least not make fun of me,” he said, his voice cold and clear.
“I wasn’t—”
He was already halfway across the room, arms full of knickknacks, determined not to listen.
After
Day Two (Thursday)
My mother’s talk about apple and celery on Skype made me hungry. I hadn’t had dinner. The old resentment surged again, annoyance at the power she seemed to hold over my body with mere words. I did as you asked in the past, I wanted to say to the laptop, now asleep with a blank screen. I worshipped at the feet of a paper beauty queen and lost not an inch of fat. I did your calisthenics and toning exercises, and all I got out of those were “calves thick as tree trunks” (your words).
I left the apartment for food. The Financial District at night was a dead zone, rows of shuttered shops squeezing narrow lanes into haphazard, triangular dead ends. I walked past a hardware store established in the 1950s. A sign read KEYS MADE. I started sobbing on the quiet street. When I confirmed no one was looking, I pressed my palms into my face and continued on unseeing.
A motorcycle gunned somewhere behind me. I started and gripped my wallet tighter. The streetlamps were so dim I couldn’t see all the way down the block, but when I peered up at the faded awnings around me I recognized Leo’s Bagels, a small deli-like space with bagels hailed as FiDi’s best, though that was mostly from a lack of competition.
So many bagels we’d had from here. Marlin and I had stumbled upon it early on in our relationship, one day when we’d spontaneously decided to play hooky and both call in sick so we could spend time together. There was no line on a workday, just a couple of tourists ahead of us. When they asked for their bagels toasted, much to the irritation of the mustachioed man we christened the Bagellier, we scoffed at them. No, we knew better than that. We ordered our breakfast untoasted like real New Yorkers, and we took our everything bagels to a tiny public garden around the corner. There, we spread the bagels’ paper clothes on our laps and listened close as we bit into yielding bread, scattering everything onto paper, sesames pinging, making it sound like spring rain that was just starting to pick up.
I could almost taste that runny tofu cream cheese. I’d opted for it out of an early-romance eagerness to please, as if I could charm Marlin further simply by trying vegan cream cheese once. Then again, we’d first been drawn to each other precisely because of our dietary choices, bonding over how veg*ism drove our meat-obsessed friends and families up the wall. We had betrayed our culture, some of them thought, offended that we would not eat their beloved char siu and satay. Right off the bat there had been something that united Marlin and me against the world, a stake on which our love, orchidlike, could twine and grow.
A shadow wavered behind a clump of short bushes in the garden ahead of me. I’d thought I was alone on this dark corner, but I could hear coughing now, coming from the stirring shadow. I lurched forward, irrationally thinking: Marlin?
It was a stranger, a man kneeling with one hand thrust into a bush. His head lolled from side to side, like he was trying to look up at me but couldn’t.
“Sir, are you all right?”
A long pause, and then: “Leave me the fa’ alone!”
So debilitated he couldn’t say “fuck.” I stared at the bush swallowing his hand and felt a sudden, perverse longing. I wanted to be lost like that too, drifting in a place that was not exactly my own life. I wanted to be messed up. I backed away from the man, knowing exactly where to go.
As I walked, I wondered for the hundredth time what Marlin might be doing now. What did it feel like for him, having changed so much? Was it a process that was discernible to the person caught within its throes?
Voltaire asked and answered: “Can one change one’s character? Yes, if one changes one’s body.”
Was that what had happened? I’d read that you could get a brain injury from simply falling off your bed. What if Marlin had taken a tumble somewhere—in the shower, riding a colleague’s hoverboard at work, while bouldering—then simply picked himself up and brushed it off, never bothering to tell me about it? He could have bumped his head and damaged it while being none the wiser.
I made a note to append this line of investigation to my list when I got home. Ahead of me, McDonald’s golden arches shone against a starless sky. This was it, what would fuck me up. If I changed my body, then perhaps I could change my character. Marlin had abandoned the things that made him himself. Maybe I could too, and maybe that would bring me closer to him somehow.
Inside, it was not like what I had imagined. The smell of industrial cleaners soured my nose. I walked up to the counter, trying to keep my breathing shallow. When the cashier cheerlessly greeted me, I was unprepared. I glanced up and ordered what was advertised directly above her head, which happened to be ten pieces of McNuggets.
“Would you like an order of twenty instead? It’s the same price,” she said.
I stared at her, stupefied. She repeated herself and tacked on the analysis that it was a good deal.
“Why is it the same price?”
She shrugged. “You can get ten nuggets for five bucks, or you can get twenty. It’s up to you.”
Odd to say, but it was then that I finally experienced the full weight of my panic. For a few long, confusing seconds, I believed that the stitches of the world had finally come undone. Marlin’s deviation from his original self had been the first sign, which was now joined by the malfunctioning of basic nugget math. Everything would soon be utter chaos. That was how I felt.
I left shaken, cradling the twenty McNuggets in my hands. Back in our apartment, I peeled the lid off a sauce pack and carefully sniffed its insides.
Then I decided it would be literally sugarcoating and so set it aside. If I was going to sabotage my vegetarianism, for so long a core part of my identity, then I would do it without some chemically yellow sauce masking that decision. I readied paper and pen next to the nuggets, intending to write down every minute sensation of my transformation.
But there was to be no detailed analysis in writing. I gagged my way through the first half of a nugget. The second half I spit out as a macerated mound. Feeling like a failure, I tried to compensate by rushing through the next half dozen meat chunks with a bare minimum of chewing, after which my jaw began to burn, followed by my stomach. My body, having long forgotten the existence of meat, was rejecting the nuggets as an alien substance that needed to be purged. I rushed to the bathroom. Out, ye devil! We drive you from us!
Before
January 2018
On our way back to New York from my father-in-law’s funeral, we had a four-hour layover in Hong Kong. We were alone with each other at last. Marlin was understandably not quite in the mood to talk, but he leaned his head into mine and huddled against me for what little comfort an international airport could provide. We sat in a din of suitcase-wheel squeaks and repetitive airport announcements, punctuated by the occasional golf-cart-type vehicle beeping past. I kept up a stream of patter, hoping to take Marlin’s mind off things a little. As usual I fretted about time running out on our visas and the hope or lack thereof of getting green cards, what with mounting difficulties thrown up by the current administration.
I knew Marlin was listening, because at this point he wordlessly handed over his phone. I glanced down at the headline centered on the screen: “Supreme Court to Take Muslim Ban Case.” I glanced at Marlin.
“You think we’ll be affected?”
Marlin yanked the phone back. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic. The court’s conservatives outnumber the liberals.”
“Malaysia is majority Muslim,” I said stupidly, as if he didn’t already know.
“We could be next on the ban list.” He completed my thought. “Unlikely, but you never know. How’s work?”
I looked at his profile. Was the abrupt question meant to gauge how close I was to a green card? Or was the phrase a mindless change of topic, the way Katie regularly used it?
“Not bad,” I said.
“Do you have Presidents’ Day off?”
“No, do you?”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll come visit you at your office.”
“No!”
I’d startled both of us. Marlin gave me a questioning look. I froze my face, trying to figure out why a coil of uneasiness was stretching out in me.
“Something wrong?”
It was Josh and the guys, I realized. I didn’t want Marlin to see the way Josh patted the edge of his desk whenever I needed to talk to him, something he did to absolutely no one else. And what if he challenged me again about having a crush on so-and-so at work? He had a strange habit of trying to link me with various coworkers in the office, including my manager Lucas, much to my mortification. I also didn’t want Marlin to hear the kinds of jokes that flew around the office, or the jokes that came out of our product AInstein’s mouth, for that matter. Worst of all, I didn’t want him to see me force a smile or even a chuckle.
I cast around for a subject distracting enough to banish Marlin’s idea of an office visit. My mother’s past life story about the banana tree spirit was fresh in my mind, and so, unfortunately, that was what I chose to retell, there on the terminal’s scuffed and rigid chairs.
Before I tell you the story, I have something to confess. I shouldn’t have twisted the truth earlier. You are my therapist, after all.
Remember how I told you about the girl in my dorm that I reported to my TA for frequent vomiting and weeping? That was me. It was the other way around; she ratted on me and got me in trouble with the school. The prominent scapulae and bony limbs, that was all wishful thinking, what I yearned to actually look like.
I was the one whose hands shook as I put on my shoes to be escorted out of my room. In the end they didn’t kick me out of the dorm, though they came close. I was allowed to stay, on the condition that I attend mandatory therapy sessions and make the therapist’s notes available to whichever school official deemed it necessary to check on me. For my own welfare, they said solemnly, though I got the impression that they were mostly concerned about the location of my “episodes.” As long as I didn’t pose a threat to myself on campus, there would be no scandal.
Knowing I deceived you, do you still want to continue emailing and talking on the phone? I understand if you want to cease communications. I shouldn’t have told a lie. But if you’re sure you want to continue, I’ll go on. It means so much, to have someone willing to listen without judgment.
I’ve spent so much time turning this following story over in my head that I’ve given it flesh and blood. Don’t get me wrong, my mother is a gifted storyteller. Yet since I first heard the story at my father-in-law’s funeral, I’ve tried so hard to inhabit it, immersing myself in the character and the world, I can’t promise I haven’t embellished some details.
It starts with the delivery of bad news.
THE BANANA TREE SPIRIT (A PAST LIFE STORY)
The most beautiful girl in the village limps home with a bucket of water balanced on her head. Her pulse quickens when she reaches the odd-shaped boulder twenty paces from where the river bends. She parts the blades of grass around the boulder, careful not to upset the bucket. There is no note. Disappointment furrows her brows. She peers around at the trees and bushes nearby, hoping to catch the playful glint of Ah Gu’s smile. But there is only the calm hurry of ants, carrying their own load.
When she gets home, her parents are waiting at the small table they use for everything: eating, sewing, air-drying harvests. Seeing her, her mother begins doling out portions of rice, her expression grim and her motions a little forceful. Her father eyes her movements and jiggles his knee.
The most beautiful girl sets the water down in the kitchen and joins them at the table, her bad leg dragging. Sure enough, her father clears his throat as soon as she sits.
“Daughter,” he says. “The engagement has been called off.”
She tries to hide her pleasure. Immediately her thoughts fly to Ah Gu, the way his eyelids tremble lower and lower as he climaxes on top of her, wreathed in the shadows of banana trees at dusk.
“Don’t you understand what this means?” Her mother wrings her hands.
“It means I can be with the one I love,” the girl says, lifting her chin.
“Stupid girl! Ah Gu won’t be marrying you either, not after what’s happened.” Her father bangs a fist on the table. A few grains of rice hop onto the dirt floor.
“What’s happened?” She looks defiantly into her parents’ eyes in turn. Dark shapes loom through the window behind her. The day’s last light sketches only the faintest edge of things, like the shape of the fence around their house. When a gust blows, with effort the light picks out the fronds of banana trees swaying, conjuring the waving of giant hands or the tossing of thick hair. Every morning clumps of these trees greet her, and she touches them where they are no longer whole—a bald patch here, an enervated limb there.
“She doesn’t know.” Her mother sighs. “You can’t blame her for not knowing.”
“Know what?”
“That we are ruined,” her father says heavily. “Ruined.”
“Why did you have to go running around with Ah Gu behind the back of your betrothed?”
“That’s not why he called off the engagement, though, is it?”
“We had our pick,” her father mutters. “So many promises of proposals, good families all of them. You know what some of them said? They told me they started saving up for you since you were thirteen, so they could compete with other families’ bride prices. Now it’s all gone. Not even Ah Gu wants you.”
The most beautiful girl swivels to look out into the night. Is it truly her
fault, or is it something that lurks out there, beyond the candlelight?
“My Ba planted those,” her father continues, waving a shaky hand at the window.
Yes, she has heard the story countless times. Her grandfather started with a handful of saplings, which bore fruit that he then piled onto a handcart wheeled from door to door. But his hardy bananas were not like their cousins with sweet, pliant flesh that the villagers loved to eat. He barely made ends meet. His luck finally turned when he married. His wife worked magic by extracting fiber from the hardy bananas to become mats, curtains, and even clothes. They started scraping by, though they never did quite become comfortable. Then the most beautiful girl in the village was born, and her parents began to hope.
“All gone now,” her father repeats, staring at the table.
None of them will say it out loud, but they all know their predicament is really because of what happened to the fishmonger’s third son, who smelled, naturally, always of fish, and seemed excessively courteous because of this. The girl remembers the way his hands glistened as he deftly pinned down the wriggling fish she’d selected from a shallow basin. Watching him in action, she thought it looked like the fish’s bright, silver life was transferring over to those hands that brought the knife slamming down. He seemed so hale.
The day after she bought the fish from him, the boy woke up listless, his skin the color of spent rice hulls. The fishmonger gave him a tongue-lashing when customers grew impatient with his slow movements, but the boy barely responded to his own name. The next day he grew worse, and in just three days he had lost a quarter of his body weight. His bones seemed to be planning an attack, floating slowly but surely to the surface like preying crocodiles. By the fifth day, he was confined to his bed.
That night, the fishmonger was roused from sleep by what sounded like supplications from his son’s room. He hurried over with a pitcher of water, concerned. Standing right outside the boy’s door, he heard a sound that almost made him drop the water. It was laughter, unmistakably his son’s. The fishmonger was so surprised that he stood rooted to the spot, and he might have kept on standing there were it not for the next sound he heard—a woman’s giggle.
