by YZ Chin
When the fishmonger burst into the room, everything flew into chaotic motion. Papers spiraled, brushes and ink stands flew. The shit bucket overturned. One hand shielding his face, the fishmonger saw a woman with translucent skin astride his giggling son. The woman, radiantly beautiful, gusted out of the open window in a brilliance of green streaks. She shot the fishmonger a look of pure malice right before she disappeared from view.
The fishmonger rushed to the window. His hands gripped the sill so hard that they bore marks for days, something he kept showing to the villagers later. Outside, it was a breezeless night. There was no wind—he would stress this repeatedly. Leaning into the stillness, the fishmonger was drawn to a movement across the pond next to his house. He squinted. The only thing moving in the world was a lone hardy banana tree that had sprung up mysteriously during the past year.
There, perched on the very top, was the translucent woman. She sat cross-legged, her long hair splayed out into space as if held up by invisible, floating demons. Yet the tree showed no signs of bearing weight, its broad leaves unruffled, without a dent or dip. How could it be? Spooked, the fishmonger leaned farther out the window, neck jutting. The alluring curves of that waist, the elegant slopes of those shoulders, and the beautiful silk of that eerie hair . . . It was, without question, the most beautiful girl in the village. The fishmonger raced out of the house in pursuit, but the girl had vanished.
By the time he returned to check on his son, the boy had perished. Sucked dry of his yang vitality, concluded the village medicine man. Sapped of his male life force.
By morning, a crowd had gathered outside the most beautiful girl’s home. The girl and her parents were forced to greet the medicine man, sent as a representative to confront the hardy banana tree spirit.
“Any dreams of flying last night?” He prodded. “Any floating sensations?” He looked at her face. He looked at her breasts. He even tried to touch her hair.
The girl fled. She pushed past her gasping parents and shot out the door into the surrounding grove of hardy banana trees. The medicine man and a few villagers chased after her, but the girl was fleet-footed. She had the advantage, too, of knowing that maze of trunks and leaves like the back of her hand. Panting, her pursuers soon lost sight of her. They swiveled their heads and looked up into the blue sky, their mouths open.
“Here!” A shout suddenly rang out. The girl’s own voice. Her accusers hurried to the source and found her crouched precariously in the branches of a tall, old tree. The tree listed to one side under its burden, a spot of blood marking its rough bark where the girl had cut up her palms.
“Get down at once,” one of the villagers ordered. “You—”
The medicine man extended a silencing hand. A hush fell over the grove. Then, with a flourish of his sleeves, he began to chant, melodic phrases intermingled with guttural yawps that no one else could comprehend.
“No! I’m not a monster!”
Even in her fury, the girl in the tree was beautiful. The men watched, paralyzed. She stood and plunged. As she rushed toward the ground, the air seemed to ripple around them, raising the hairs on their arms on end.
The girl landed on her side. One foot arrived last, trailing the rest of her. When the foot made contact with the soil, it bounced high, then smashed down once more. From the foot’s odd bent angle, they could all tell that something precious had departed, never to return again.
“Do you believe me now?” the girl said through gritted teeth. “I can’t fly, see? Not at all. Look, my hands are bleeding. Is that proof enough? Or do you want me to fart in your face? Ghosts don’t fart, do they? How about watching me take a shit?”
A bizarre and unrealistic tale, isn’t it? A young girl trying to convince an entire village of her innocence by maiming herself. And yet I was moved by the pointless bravado.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t catch on to the central barb in my mother’s story. In that supposed past life of mine, I possessed great beauty but acted rashly and dishonorably. As punishment, I am doomed in my present life to be homely. For most of my life my mother had urged me to not “eat like a pig,” later amended to be “like an American” after I escaped to New York. She herself was svelte and youthful, and she relished nothing more than to be mistaken for my sister.
Katie’s take on this was that I should play up what I had, and draw attention away from what I didn’t. “Get to know your own face and body,” she told me. I tried, leaning right up against mirrors to pore over my, well, pores. Which of my features were strengths, and which weaknesses? In the end, I realized that the game was rigged. “Strengths” and “weaknesses” were evaluated in comparison to all the other faces out there in the world. In that way, the scrutiny of my face could never be on its own terms, but always measured against an unspoken standard of beauty, a double always projected over my own inadequate mien.
And yet Marlin found me desirable once. When he looked at me, he glimpsed something different from what my mother saw, what I myself couldn’t bear to scrutinize in my reflection. (Please, no need to comfort me. I’m just sharing my honest feelings.)
My mother probably meant the banana tree spirit story as yet another source of motivation for me to get my act together and lose some weight. I interpreted it simultaneously as what people called “negging” (am I using that correctly?), and also an oddly moving account of defiance. Whereas Marlin, his takeaway was something else entirely.
After
Day Two (Thursday)
Around four in the morning, the McDonald’s nuggets’ destructive effect on my bowels finally subsided. I slumped against the cold bathtub we never used for its intended purpose, preferring instead to stand right under the showerhead. Both of us had grown up with a tank and a pail from which we scooped water onto our bodies. Lying down to get clean seemed unnatural.
It wasn’t the first time I’d hoped for psychic transformation and ended with diarrhea. The previous time was over a decade before, when I’d just gotten my acceptance letter to an American college. I was terrified at the prospect of leaving the country for the first time to be in a place where I knew nobody, and also paradoxically terrified of staying, now that I knew leaving was possible. I was afraid of incurring future regret, if that makes any sense.
I read and reread the letter, hiding it from my mother. On one hand, I was eager to flee my mother’s judgment and her incessant attempts to mold me. On the other, what did I know about America, except what I’d seen in movies?
For a week I barely slept. I was convinced this was a major fork in my life, and the wrong decision would doom the rest of my days. I walked around squeezing my temples with the heel of my palms, and soon I started having vaguely suicidal impulses, like wanting to step into traffic or wondering what garden shears would feel like against the skin of my stomach. Just little blips of irrational curiosity, nothing more. I was young, though, and scared. I wanted help.
I was familiar with the concept of psychiatrists, but had never seen one advertising services in my small town. For lack of a better choice, I went to a Western family medicine clinic, where I sat down in front of a gruff male doctor and very earnestly said that I would like to be prescribed antidepressants. The doctor grunted and asked if I had any thoughts of self-harm. I hung my head and confessed the little blips. He wrote something down on his pad, and then I was on my way to collect pills from the dispensary. I walked away already feeling a little better, believing that I would soon be relieved of those unwanted thoughts.
At home, I hid in the bathroom and looked at the pills. I decided to take one more than the prescribed number, wanting to get better faster so that I could finally make a clearheaded decision about whether to leave for America.
After swallowing the pills I hugged my knees and waited, the American college acceptance letter half rising from its accordioned pleats at my feet. For a while I wasn’t sure anything was happening; I wavered between conviction that the pills were working and suspicions about placebo effec
t. I was about to go find the kitchen shears as an experiment when it hit me, a grinding pain in my gut like someone was mincing my insides for wonton filler. I collapsed back into my chair and then almost immediately jumped back up. I rushed to the bathroom and groped to raise the toilet seat, hunched over like a shrimp.
Many agonizing hours later, when I had the sense to read the fine print on the pill packaging, I saw that my prescription antidepressants were nothing more than common laxatives. Perhaps the doctor believed that emptying my bowels would rid me of my more alarming feelings, the way leeches were once used to drain patients of bad blood.
THERE WERE STILL A HANDFUL OF NUGGETS LEFT WHEN I JUDGED IT SAFE to leave the bathroom. I touched their cold crusts, my finger pads brushing back and forth like an archaeologist demanding a story from an inert shard. The experiment had not been a success. I felt no closer to understanding how Marlin had changed. I looked around the apartment, hoping for some other inspiration.
My gaze landed on the TV. Marlin had loved watching nature documentaries. They weren’t quite my cup of tea; I found them dry. When Marlin streamed them, I’d sit next to him but busy myself with something else, like studying programming for interviews. Now I regretted not paying more attention. Marlin had derived pleasure from those panning high-definition shots, just like he had once found joy in my company. Was there any magic left in either for him?
Cold nuggets in my lap, I turned the TV on and pulled up one of the documentaries Marlin had been watching. It was about ants. The deep-voiced narrator talked about the ants’ mysterious hive mind, which regulates the makeup of the colony’s occupants. Based on the colony’s needs, the hive mind might determine that 50 percent of the worker ants need to gather food, while 25 percent should be soldiers, with the rest staying close by the queen to serve her whims.
Say the half of food-gathering ants are out in the open, doing their job. Say it is a sunny, scorching day. Suddenly a shadow obscures. From the sky, a shoe plummets onto the trail of ants winding its way between food source (dead gnat) and home. In a twitch of an antenna, a large number of ants are snuffed out. Their bodies lie in a kind of squashed, semi-solid puddle. The ants snaking up from behind crawl around the puddle like it’s just another obstruction. They’re bearing precious gnat cargo; they cannot stop. Because the ant in front of them has not stopped, and the ant behind them hasn’t either.
The vanguard approaches home. Some distance away from the nest, they run into soldier ants from their colony. They exchange information via pheromones with their nest mates. Chemicals rise and waft from the shiny bodies of the ants that have survived a massacre. The soldier ants twitch, receptive. Then in them a switch flips, without need for conscious, individual thought. They are instantly reprogrammed because the colony is now imbalanced: the ratio of food gatherers to soldiers is off, and at this rate the queen won’t have enough to eat. A very precise number of ex-soldiers fall seamlessly into step with the food gatherers, transformed. They have now assumed whole new identities for the greater good.
That’s what the change in Marlin felt like. Total, and absent deliberate decisioning. Brainwashed, I’d thought at first. Or, in Chinese: “taming of the head.” Voodoo. Black magic. Here it was, a scientific equivalent found in ants. What if humanity was similarly connected and orchestrated into achieving some kind of balance? Maybe, somewhere, there’d been a cliff fall in the number of people who believed in spirits. Then the smell of the world changed: oilier, more like cacti and less like hibiscus. Marlin lifted his beautiful head of curls and sniffed, nostrils flaring.
Before
May 2018
I forget what I was dreaming about that night. It might even have been the beautiful girl and her hardy banana trees. Whatever the dream was, it was harrowing or strange enough that I did not immediately realize I was awake when Marlin startled me from sleep. He was sitting up in bed, back ruler-straight, shouting. He yelled without forming words, the unfamiliar sounds coming as if from the deepest reserves of his throat.
After a moment, I understood I was no longer dreaming. I groped for his arm.
“Wake up, Marlin.”
His face was turned slightly away from me. I couldn’t see them, but I imagined his eyes squeezed shut in terror. I was utterly unprepared when his wild screams stopped and he turned to look right at me. His eyes were wide, clear, and lucid when he asked: “Why did you cheat on me?”
I stammered in surprise, every sentence imbued with uptalk. I had never? I would never? Why would he think? I can’t believe?
“Not never. You’ve done it before,” he said. “With Ah Gu.” He threw the name down on our bedsheets with finality and conviction.
“Ah Gu? From the banana tree spirit story? Are you serious?”
He simply stared at me.
“It’s just a story! You know how my mom is, she’s superstitious and she has an overactive imagination. Also she makes up these stories to judge me on the way I live, you know all that. I’ve told you!”
“So you’re saying she has nothing better to do than sit around all day coming up with stories to annoy you?”
I felt slashed. It hurt, having to defend myself against the charge of cheating in particular. Years and years ago, I’d closed my eyes and made a wish to no entity in particular that if I could please, please just get a boyfriend or girlfriend, I would treasure them forever. I would never cheat on them. I’d told Marlin this silly anecdote, just as I’d shared my feelings about my mother’s past life stories with him, and now he was using both against me?
“Even if that did happen in a so-called past life, I don’t remember any of it, so it has no bearing on our situation now,” I said, trying to sprinkle some logic into the argument. But that turned out to be my grave misstep. Marlin pounced, seizing upon what I’d just said like it was a confession.
“Even though you can’t directly reason about it, things buried deep in your subconscious can still influence your behavior. Your past life memories are one of those things.”
“Where did you learn all this? From your ‘spiritual advisers’?”
“Now you’re just deflecting. Tell me, who is it? Your yoga teacher? A barista? Someone at work?”
For some reason I thought of Josh then, the way he kept embarrassing me by claiming I had crushes on a rotating cast of colleagues. I could feel my face start to heat up.
“I barely go to yoga,” I said weakly.
“You’re clearly hiding something. Why do you never tell me anything about your job? You’re just like the banana girl, lying to Li Shen.”
“Li Shen?”
“You don’t even remember! The fiancé, the one she cheated on!”
“Okay, the point is, I’m not cheating on you.” I was crying now, worn down.
He swung his legs off the bed, turning his back to me. I wanted to hug him from behind, the way I used to early on in our relationship. I’d press my face into his back and soak up his warmth without letting him see my expression. I was sure then that my happiness couldn’t last; it felt so undeserved.
I didn’t hug Marlin that night we fought. I wiped my tears and convinced myself that Marlin was still half asleep, his outburst a temporary by-product of nightmares. I curled up on my side of the bed, thinking that in the morning he would be back to normal, a dependable Myers-Briggs T if ever there was one.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY IT. KATIE BEAT YOU TO IT. WHEN I TOLD HER what had happened, she gasped so loud that heads turned in the busy café we were in. I stopped talking and tugged on her sleeve, hoping the motion would make her lower the coffee cup she was holding dramatically aloft. She did, but chose to keep her mouth stretched wide in imitation of the famous Munch painting.
“That’s, like, verbal abuse,” she eventually said.
“What? No.” I frowned.
“He’s gaslighting you! He’s making you feel guilty for something you didn’t do.”
“He’s going through a lot. Maybe he just woke up from a dream and was
still confused.”
“You don’t take it out on your wife like that, though!”
“Can you speak a little softer? Also, who’s he supposed to turn to?” I grabbed her again, trying to pull her closer. “I’ve met his dad. I was there at the funeral. Who else even remotely understands what he’s going through?”
“So that’s your plan? Grin and bear it because there’s no one else?”
“You don’t abandon your spouse when he’s in pain.”
She had no immediate comeback for this. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but I hoped it was of the time she called me a bitch, in an earnest way, after I hid her phone to prevent her from calling her ex’s new girlfriend.
“You’re better than this,” I had said to her, over and over, while she continued calling me names.
Katie lifted her coffee cup and drained it like it was sloshing with vodka. “Well, as long as it’s a onetime thing. He should be snapping out of it soon, right? What’s it been, six months?”
“More like four. Both your parents are alive, though. Maybe you don’t know what it feels like.”
“You lost your dad,” she pointed out.
“Yeah. But I don’t remember that much.” I put my cup back in its saucer too hard and winced at the inelegant clang. I stared at my lap. With my head down, I could feel Katie’s eyes on me. A while later she asked if I was ready to go.
After
Day Three (Friday)
I woke up convinced Marlin was back. There was no reason to think so, no sound from another part of the apartment. I simply sat up on the couch and blinked, waiting for him to sit down next to me. My delusion went beyond just believing he had physically returned. I had somehow been sure, for a moment, that he was his old self again, logical and unflappable. I checked my phone, heart pounding impatiently, but there was nothing there from him either.
