by YZ Chin
“I’d like that,” I replied, tears dribbling. “But it’s Marlin you should help. Somehow he picked up the thing you do, spiritual dowsing, and he—” I threw a hand up in a helpless gesture, knocking into her hovering hand. She withdrew it.
“I think the first thing we should do is be honest with ourselves. It’s you who needs help, right? Can we agree on that?”
I did not see that coming at all. I shook my head hard. I tried to explain everything. Although Carol did not interrupt me or deny my story in any way, she communicated with her look that she absolutely thought I was going down the wrong path. She had a very expressive face.
“This Marlin, he’s the one who referred you here?”
“In a way.” I couldn’t meet her eyes. The door to the room seemed far away.
“What does he look like?”
I started to say “Chindian,” then winced. It wasn’t a term familiar to Americans. I remembered having to explain it to Katie, the way I also had to explain it to you. In Malaysia, where everybody is hyperconscious of ethnicity, the word is a shorthand. How you are categorized in turn determines the kind of treatment you receive from everyone around you, friends and shopkeepers alike. Every year, Marlin dreaded Ramadan. With his darker skin and round eyes, he was often accosted while eating lunch during fasting month by self-righteous uncles ready to berate him for being a bad Muslim. It had happened to me a couple times too, when I had to produce my IC and point to my obviously non-Muslim name—May I eat my economy rice in peace now? Sometimes, in the face of their obvious error, the uncles only hardened more. Who sold you this rice? they wanted to know. Marlin would walk around for the rest of the day worried that he’d gotten some poor hawker in trouble with the religious authorities.
Katie laughed at the end of my roundabout explanation. “What’s your point?”
I said I moved to New York to escape being racially pegged every time I stepped outside. I was tired of constantly thinking about the color of my skin.
She snickered. “Well, you’ve come to the absolute worst country for that.”
“But you’ve never thought about living somewhere else?”
“No, I can’t imagine it.”
I envied her. What it must be like, to grow up not hearing friends declare that they were going to leave as soon as they could, even if they had to “jump aeroplane” in Singapore or Australia or Taiwan—work as illegal immigrants, that is. “This country doesn’t love us,” they’d say as justification. “There aren’t as many opportunities for people like us.”
Being loved is not a basic necessity, I’d replied. I can live without love. It’s easy.
And I’d really believed it too. That was before the acceptance letter to an American college, before I started imagining what it would feel like to be free of my mother. Before Marlin.
“He has curly hair that hangs past his ears. About this tall.” I stood on tiptoes over Carol, one hand slicing air above my head. “Really big earlobes, if that’s something you notice about people.”
“Beautiful hair.” She nodded.
“Yes,” I said, crying, abject, at this first validation I’d gotten from her. “He’s an engineer,” I pleaded. “He doesn’t belong here.”
I thought she would trot out the Nobel Laureate or Einstein. Instead, she said, “People are complicated. Including you. There is so much within you that you don’t understand, that you refuse to see. Don’t you want to expand your potential?”
No, I didn’t. I took a few steps away, so I wasn’t crying right into her lap. I wanted Marlin back the way he was, the rock in my life, the person who reliably had a plan and action steps whenever I felt lost. He was the one who’d started teaching me programming basics. He coached me through my job interview for AInstein. Throughout the process he’d been so enthusiastic about the fact that I was sharing in his interests, putting one foot into his world of code and building things from nothing but keyboard strokes. I’d willingly moved into his sphere, just for him to leave me for an alien planet?
“You are too upset right now to practice. Dowsing requires you to be relaxed, free of negative feelings. Here.” Carol handed me tissues, splayed on top of a piece of paper with dense text. “Those are instructions for beginners. Try it later when you’re feeling better.”
She stood up and unceremoniously guided me toward the faraway door.
“Don’t forget the cord,” she said when I crossed the threshold. Sniffling, I extracted my front-door key from her cord and gave it back to her.
I SPENT THE TRAIN RIDE BACK FEELING FOOLISH. I’D IMAGINED BEING COVERT, a spylike figure who gathered answers and then walked out of the Dowsers Society without showing my hand. Would Carol tell Marlin about my visit? And if she did, would she characterize me as concerned for his well-being? So much depended upon the story she told.
The Hudson’s winks were intolerable now, taunting, too chipper, like flashes of white teeth some American parents paid for their children to have. What had I learned from this trip? That Carol had a magnetic personality tinged with brutal efficiency, which might have appealed to the engineer in Marlin. Perhaps she was the one who’d convinced him of his potential, she whose hand guided his into spinning, spinning, spinning.
I wanted our old Sundays back, fun and messy hours coming up with ways to make the wackiest vegan versions of nonvegan food, such as vegan sardines and vegan Froot Loops (the regular kind contains sheep bits—shocking, I know). Marlin, as could be predicted, approached the whole thing as a science experiment. His favorite parts were when he got to read up on chemistry, or when he gleefully mixed things that normally would never go together. He was the one who insisted on having beakers instead of normal measuring cups.
In many of these experiments I played a supporting role, passing ingredients or dipping a finger in for a taste. Laughter-filled times, the rare kind that tap you on the shoulder to whisper This is happiness as you are deep in the moment, the realization then amplifying the emotion, like feedback reverberating in a tiny bar.
Maybe by eating meat now, I was making sure I wouldn’t have those vegan experiments with anyone else. This way, I would never again experience that specific kind of happiness. It might seem childish at first, but it can also be interpreted as a way to protect those memories. At least I think so.
OUTSIDE GRAND CENTRAL I BOUGHT A HOT DOG FROM A STREET CART, then walked down the block and ordered another dog from another cart. I asked for everything on the first, and nothing on the second. A man walked by with newspapers folded under his armpit, and I started to cry again. I should have been home all day, sprawled on the living room floor elbowing Marlin, a newspaper page spread out before us. The race would be on, me trying to solve my crossword puzzle on the left before he could complete his sudoku on the right.
Whenever I won, he would rib that crossword puzzles were just a collection of useless trivia. Whenever he won (almost always), I would jeer at him and say he was simply rearranging nine measly numbers on a grid.
I could feel it, a mess of tears, mustard, and relish across my cheek, mashed on top of my mole. I swiped at my face with tiny, sheer napkins. I picked roughly at the mole on my cheek. I wanted to change too. A new start.
HOW I GOT MY MOLE (A PAST LIFE STORY)
The woman who is me in a past life runs into the burning hut, screaming her son’s name. A curtain entangles her when she tries to push past it to reach the bedroom. The fabric clings to her face. She feels her man’s arm belt her waist. She struggles, thinking he is telling her to leave her son, but he shouts at her to look, and she turns to see their baby boy crying on the floor to their left, his legs splayed and kicking.
She opens her mouth to scream for him to come over, but instead she bends down coughing. Her chest feels like it’s been pierced all over with a sharpened stone, and all the air and blood contained within is leaking out into the rest of her body, swelling her limbs and making her head heavy. The more she tries to breathe, the more the holes in her ch
est burn.
Her man pulls her down to the floor, where the air is cleaner and clearer. This is like drowning in reverse, she thinks, where the suffocation does not rise from the depths of hell but rather presses down from the direction of heaven. She risks an upward glance to see the form the smoke takes, waiting for it to gather into a spectral tiger, bird, or dragon.
“What are you doing?” her man hisses. While she was spellbound, he has retrieved their son. She crouches and takes the boy into her arms, praying he will not remember this day.
Her man starts for the door, and she follows. He is doing his best to clear the way with a broom he picked up, sending fallen pieces of their hut skidding along the floor. The fire is loud, very loud. There’s something insectlike about its screeches, as if the fire has many legs that are being pulled off one by one. The hut has been repainted in violent hues. She can see right through parts of the flames like they’re made of the sheerest cloth, but she knows she will not be able to tear through them. She hugs her boy close and tries to keep up with her man, her eyes watering. Every few steps something grabs at her feet.
The attap roof sticks out a tongue of fire and licks itself clean, until there is no roof and suddenly, in its place, a square of sky and an impossible pain. She screams and looks down at a wooden post, large as a young ciku tree. Somewhere under it is her foot. She tries to move it but cannot. Flames dance on the post, giving it movement, like it is the one struggling to get off her.
She presses her boy’s face harder into her chest, her mouth gasping to breathe through the pain. She meets her man’s eyes when a section of the wall next to them gives way. A flying spark lands on her cheek, singeing her flesh. The sting makes the decision for her.
“Take him!” She throws the boy through the air and watches his swaddle come partly undone. The man’s eyes protrude with shock. But she knows he will catch their son safely, and he does. A triangle of the swaddle flaps, dangling, as if beckoning the flames, which do come, lapping at the tip of fabric.
She tries one last time to get her foot back. With all her strength she pulls on her calf, and the excruciation comes in such a wave that she thinks she must have succeeded, but when she looks down she is still pinned. She screams, a long word that doesn’t exist. But the man understands. So he does what she asks. He holds the baby tight and heads for the direction of safety. The smoke chases them out of sight, taking the form of a beautiful woman.
After
Day Five (Sunday)
I jerked awake to an insistent sound. I rubbed my eyes, and there was my mother’s face on my laptop next to me. The Skype call ringtone persisted for a few more moments. When it stopped, I leaned in to check the screen. It was just after eight at night.
My face hurt. I let my fingers crawl all over it. The mole was still there, a blot of firm finality. This was the way things were, it said.
I was fourteen, standing in front of a mirror and worrying the mole. Someone at school had made fun of me, saying it looked like I had permanent bird shit on my face. My mother walked in. I wanted to ask her for help.
“Stop touching it,” she said. “Or it’ll grow bigger.”
Horrified, I dropped my hands. That’s when she told me about my past life, the one in which I was trapped in a fire.
“You were burned there,” my mother said, pointing to my mole.
I couldn’t understand the moral of the story. Was it to instill motherly virtues in me, by preemptively describing me as a woman who would make the ultimate sacrifice for her baby? I didn’t ask my mother to elaborate. But I kept thinking about the story, and it kept showing up in my dreams unbidden. It was only after I’d moved to America that she started referring to the mole as a bringer of bad luck.
“That’s fucked up,” Katie said when I told her. “Telling a fourteen-year-old they were burned to death? That’s absolutely the most painful way to die, you know.”
“Parenting styles are different in Asia,” I said, uncomfortable. I’d wanted her to help me decode the story, not to probe my relationship with my mother.
I told myself that I was respecting my mother by giving weight to her visions, filling them in with sensory details. The recurring dreams meant I was taking her stories seriously, which could be a kind of love. I preferred it over raw resentment.
My phone lit up next, my mother’s contact photo—a selfie of her in a polyester windbreaker at Genting Highlands—peering out through a porthole. I sat up straighter on the couch. I couldn’t talk to her, not before I reunited with Marlin. I was sure she’d pin the blame for our separation on me. “You’re very lucky,” I heard her say again on our wedding day.
I turned the volume all the way down on the phone and waited until it stopped convulsing with loud death rattles against the coffee table. I thought about how easy it would be to stop being a daughter. It had taken only a moment to no longer be a wife—the time it took to switch on a light and register a blank space bordered by dust. Why should other identities take any longer to lose?
It would be so simple. A push of a button that wasn’t even real, and my mother could be deleted from my phone. She had no friends or kin in the alien country of USA. She didn’t even have a passport. By the time she got one and appeared in front of a US embassy worker to be grilled for a tourist visa, I could have moved. Even if it was just to another borough, how would she ever find me? The word borough itself was unknown to her.
No work at all to undo, this supposedly most sacred of all bonds. It didn’t seem unreasonable to me. It just seemed sad.
MY LACK OF SLEEP FROM THE LAST FEW DAYS HAD CAUGHT UP TO ME. When I woke up again I was still on the couch. My neck hurt, and my right shoulder was hunched almost up to my ear, even when I stood up and tried to stretch.
I moved to the bed proper, but lying on the rumpled sheets only made me miss Marlin, his warm body. He never minded that my hands were always cold. When we had sex I’d grip his burning shoulders or run my icy palms up and down the tautness of his back, and he wouldn’t even flinch.
“You drive me crazy,” he once rasped into my neck.
I smiled into his hair, immeasurably pleased. It seemed the ultimate achievement. I gripped the nape of his neck, surer of myself than I had ever been. For however brief a time, I had pulled him beyond his own boundaries. That was magic.
I GAVE UP ON THE BED. I WASN’T SO MUCH TOSSING AND TURNING AS writhing. I called Eamon, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice.
“It’s ten o’clock, Edwina.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just want to know if he’s still there.”
“He is. For now.”
Was it me, paranoid me, or did it sound like he was gritting his teeth?
“Did something happen?”
“Listen, in case you’re thinking of showing up unannounced again: don’t do it. He’s not ready to see you.”
“He won’t answer my calls or emails. What else can I do?”
Eamon was silent for a while. When he answered, his voice seemed to have softened. It was almost gentle.
“You could write him a letter.”
“How is that different from an email?”
“It just feels different, right? Handwriting is so personal.”
I wondered: maybe he had sent his ex-fiancée letters.
Marlin’s graph paper was the only writing material I could find in the apartment. The paper’s little plots of squares unnerved me, insisting on orderliness when my thoughts were hopelessly jumbled. I stared at the cage-like squares, frustrated. For the first time in my life, I wished that an AI would take over for me. Figure out the minimally viable words that would achieve the expected outcome of my husband’s return.
When Marlin was helping me improve my coding skills, he gave me an assignment. I was supposed to write a straightforward shell script and cron job combo that acted as a reminder. A user could specify a time and a note, say to walk the dog at 16:00. At that specified time, the script would both emit a sound and also disp
lay the previously entered note. There was allure in having machines do our bidding, Marlin explained.
After I successfully completed the assignment, I slyly set a daily reminder on Marlin’s laptop. Every day, at precisely 10:00 p.m., an alert pinged. “Tell Edwina I love her,” it read. “Don’t forget.”
In the end, all I could manage for the letter was this exact refrain. I scribbled down the words, which looked wild on the graph paper, breaking loose and trampling all over the borders of the little squares. “Tell Edwina I love her. Don’t forget.” I knew he was no longer the “I” of that reminder. I was appealing to routine, to habit that had, I hope, hardened into instinct. Supposedly it takes sixty-six days for repeated behavior to become “automatic.” Doubtless you’ve heard.
After
Day Six (Monday)
Another sunny summer morning in Manhattan, winter decorative cabbages giving way to more vibrant leafy plants on sidewalks, protected by ankle-height tree guards made of rusty steel. This was the city I lived in, littered with dog shit to step around and vest-wearing people holding clipboards to avoid. You know how it is. Though for too long after I moved here, I’d stream a movie, a romantic comedy perhaps, or something like a wry take on urban millennial living, and it’d be set in New York, and I’d watch, wistful, wishing I were there. Then, with a start, I’d recognize a street corner or a flash of the skyline and realize I did live in that same place depicted on-screen, except my life had nothing to do with that silver city. It was like getting glimpses of a parallel dimension.
Since I was up too early, I decided to walk to work. I dropped my letter to Marlin in a sidewalk mailbox not far from the office and went into a tiny café nearby. No seating space, and no one in line. A handwritten sign on the counter read: “We’re cashless!”
