I left for the Asian market.
4 The Asian Market
The windows of the Asian market were steamed and I smelled shrimp frying. Strings of packaged candy hung like beaded curtains and bowls of jade sat on dark lacquer shelves. I picked up a calendar that was lying on a wicker chair. It was full of Chinese girls wearing satin. When I flipped through it, it sounded like a fan whirring in another room.
On the grocery side a cook was stirring a pot and yelling in Chinese. Then he yelped and threw something. There was a huge clatter of thin metal, like a tray of spoons falling. A woman came out and they started arguing. The cook was holding a towel around his hand and kicking the oven door. I could see him through the hanging meat. He was just beneath two birds strangled and dangling with feet twined and tied to a crossbeam. The fluorescent light made the cook’s skin look gray and yellow against his white shirt.
I looked through a basket full of Buddhas on the shelf next to me. Some were brass and others were gunmetal gray, no bigger than bullets. One was the size of a golf ball. I picked it up and thought about buying it and throwing it through the glass door of the box-mall-church. But that door wouldn’t break no matter how hard I threw it. I couldn’t do it anyway. I’d be afraid I’d hit someone or scare some kid so I put it back. I’m sick of how they always win.
On the floor was a basket full of fans. They had bamboo spines and collapsed like butterfly knives. Fans with flowers, pagodas, birds and the names of cities: Bangkok, Osaka, Tokyo on orange skies with burgundy suns and I thought, I need to get something, something for someone but I didn’t know whom. I tried to imagine giving a fan to Annette. Maybe one that said Phnom Penh in red over a field of yellow. I could leave it on her nightstand and she’d put it somewhere special. But I couldn’t take what it would mean to her. That would just be too much. I picked out a white fan with a single black branch on it. Good for all occasions.
The boxes of fortune cookies were at the end of the aisle. A recent shipment had come in. I usually get a bag, which has about thirty useable fortunes but I decided to buy a whole box, which has twenty bags. It was more than I’d ever bought until then and I felt a slight reeling in the deepest part of my abdomen. I took the fan and the box up to the register and paid. It started to rain really hard and they let me hang out inside to see if it would let up.
I was leaning against the gumball machines by the front window and trying to stay out of the way. Outside, under the awning was a red metal newspaper stand that had been tagged and dented. Through the glass and wire grid holding the paper I saw a picture of a woman crouching, aflame. A man and a young girl were running down a street. Behind them was a wall of smoke. On the side, down in the corner of the photo, was the person crouching. All around her fire, like a corona, spread into the black ink. She was as dark as an eclipse and held herself still and burned. Chinese characters ran in lines down the page around her. That reeling came again, only deeper, like something was shaking loose in a place that nobody had ever been before. The doors of the box-mall-church flashing like mica. The cook with the burnt hand, flailing. The glitter of progress; the sheen of nostalgia. Out by the older malls are huge Asian markets with the HDL screens by the register. They play videos of Filipinos running through Scottish castles in jodhpurs and trailing lace. He has a riding crop and she, an empire waist. Unagi. Bonjour! Dónde está el arroz? But it’s not some vibrant, new, glittering incongruity. I know. I see glittering incongruities. I see people on fire. Right there on the front page of newspaper, leaning against the gumball machine because it was raining so hard, I saw the girl on fire in the corner of the photo, crouching. Then I felt the panic like I do always when it’s like that, like it’s happening right now, like they’re dying in front of me.
I turned to get help, to ask the man at the counter or the woman in back what had happened. They said it was just sports. Apparently there was a big game and some jocks set some stuff on fire. It happened days ago. Everyone is fine. But they’re not. I can see from their faces. I can’t speak Chinese but I can tell they are not fine.
Sports. Sports riot.
I took a few breaths and tried to calm down. Raina says nothing’s ever really wrong it’s just the story we tell ourselves. I think it’s the other way around. But I tried anyway. I rewrote the events in the picture. The woman crouching in the smoke had pockets full of bobbleheads. The man and the young girl had just shared a hot dog and arena nachos. It wasn’t the war. It was just a game. But of course it was the war, I could hear it breathing under the net.
Down the street I heard some kind of blast or crash. Following the Law of Superposition it should be: sound> association> meaning> rxn—but it isn’t order because the meaning never changes and the sound can be anything. There was a rumble that I couldn’t place—step out on to the broadening path! On even the brightest days when everyone is shining in the sun-flooded world what’s wrong with a golden retriever playing with a pink child on a green field? A red Frisbee cutting through the blue sky under a white cloud? Nothing. It makes watching it all get blasted to tendons and fur so life-like. Sports riot. Terror is a chemical storm. The events are static, not the meaning. Sports. I left the box of fortunes by the register, said I’d get it later.
In front of the Asian market I could hear for a thousand miles. The rain was getting lighter and the streets shone. On the corner was a sports bar. I know because it had a poster of a rabid dog tearing some other animal apart and a co-ed with team color panties on the door. The parking lot was full of tanks and The Game reflected off their windshields…I dreamt one thousand basketball courts, nothing holier than sports…I’m going to make them feel what I feel. I went to a payphone by the bus stop. I mean what it’s like to be fucking scared all the time and caught in the center of some big horrible thing you have no control over, that you can’t even feel the edges of, a slideshow of species trauma.
I looked up the number of the sports bar and called in a bomb threat. I don’t even know where the idea came from. When the bartender answered I told him they were all going to die in multiple explosions during the fourth quarter. Then I went and looked through the windows to see what would happen, but nothing did. They were pink and bored. The bartender finished a crossword puzzle. One guy near the TV yelled when a ball switched hands and slammed his fist down on the table knocking off a red plastic ashtray, which rattled in circles on its rim then stopped. They are untouchable.
I waited a little while then called Jimmy. I asked her to pick me up because I didn’t want to call Annette. She showed up in her truck. I got in and put the box of fortunes between us on the seat.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Sure. I love watching the ship timbers wash ashore in the tide.
“I’m tired.”
We pulled out into traffic and sat there with the windows down and water coming in everywhere because the defrost doesn’t work and the windows fog up. Everyone was going under forty because it was rush hour and the rain was so hard. She turned on the radio and dialed it to a Mexican station but the engine hum cancelled out everything but the brass. Half a conversation. The trumpets were answering something inaudible. We didn’t talk until we got out on the freeway.
Mirror had told me Jimmy was leaving. I think Credence said something about it too but I had put it out of my mind.
“I got my ticket today,” Jimmy said.
“Costa Rica?”
“No, Honduras.”
Cars sped up and fanned as a newly built fifth lane appeared on the left shoulder for half a mile then disappeared and drove us all back together.
“I got you a fan,” I said. “As a going away gift.”
Another pool of light.
“Yeah,” Jimmy rolled the window up some, “I’m about done with all of this.”
The traffic slowed near a huge billboard made of lights. It had a truck on it that spun in a circle and then exploded into yellow stars. Every time it happened Jimmy’s face lit up and the fine brown hai
rs on top of her head turned gold. She looked like she had an aura and I thought, maybe that’s how people see them. Maybe you have to know someone really well to see those things.
“It has a cherry tree on it,” I said.
“What has?”
“The fan I got you. It’s all white with a black cherry tree on it. I think it’s winter. There aren’t any blossoms.”
Another burst of the billboard lights and Jimmy’s hair was gold again. Even her eyelashes, when she turned her head, sparked then blackened. The traffic thinned and we started to move. The windows were still down far enough that the rain stung my cheeks as we picked up speed. She reached across and wiped fog from the windshield with her forearm and everything became clear. I didn’t know it wasn’t until she wiped it away and then it was so sharp it seemed ridiculous. Through the glass where the arc of Jimmy’s arm had stopped and under the canopy of fog I saw a river of dark shadows glinting dully off each other. Steel and taillights poured into the valley then splashed up over the edge of a distant rise.
“Maybe I’ll get a ticket too,” I said.
A passing neon sign splashed vermillion on Jimmy’s cheek. Again, I saw Grace, my mother, back before her hair turned dark and her eyes crawled the world like spiders. Suddenly, I got the idea that I wanted Jimmy to think about me when she was gone. I wanted her to say my name. I reached over and touched her face. She twitched so I pulled my hand back.
“What are you doing?”
“If it’s not okay I won’t.”
She looked at me then back at the road. Cars coasted like blackbodies cooling in a sea of brakelights.
“Well,” she said after a minute, “I guess it’s okay. Just strange.”
I touched her face again. I thought about telling Credence and how he would think it was funny. But it wasn’t. Not really. It was as fucked up as everything else. Now? Is that too hard? No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s all about the breathing. It’s about how much fear you hide in your cells: blue cells, green cells, red cells, sickle cells, sleeper cells, jail cells—people are shot through with it. But I don’t hold my fear there. Everybody needs a place where they’re fearless or they’d never survive, at least I wouldn’t. Sometimes I hate this world. Especially when it’s more beautiful than I can imagine.
The freeway lights stuttered and the valley sank. We ran with the rest of the traffic into a furrow lined with restaurant chains and competing gas prices. Jimmy’s skin was light brown above her jeans and cream colored below like I thought it would be. And maybe I saw a garden beyond a gate. And maybe it wasn’t a garden but a reflection of a garden. It was so clear to me now. I just somehow hadn’t seen it. Everything had already erupted. There was nothing to save.
I had been kissing the hems of ghosts.
5 Jimmy
The morning light on Jimmy’s face showed all the tiny scars she had from being alive. Above her eye was a small white scar that pulled when she squinted and next to that, another scar, thin as a wrinkle, from a car wreck. Under her chin was a ragged patch of raised tissue from wiping out on a skateboard. She wouldn’t get it stitched because she didn’t want to pay the ER bills.
I tried to move but her hair was tangled in my ring. I twisted it but couldn’t get the ring off because my fingers were swollen from sleep. She was laughing the whole time, which made it harder. Finally, we had to cut the hair out with the scissors of her Swiss army knife, which was lying on the makeshift nightstand.
“Not like it matters,” she said and threw the bleached orange lock behind her where it landed coiled and soundless.
The sheets were tangled. The white fan with the cherry branch lay open by the mattress. Jimmy reached over my body and picked up a photo that was lying face down on the floor.
“This is where I’m going,” she said and handed the picture to me.
A colony of shacks sat unevenly on a clay hillside. Behind them, boxwood carpeted the mountain slopes, receding up into a distant cloud forest.
“The village is Indian.”
Because the search for authenticity is a well without a bottom.
“Very beautiful,” I said and handed the picture back.
Pale light filtered through the gauze window curtain, whitening the sheets and turning Jimmy’s shoulder and hip the color of ivory.
“If you’re going to tell Credence,” she said, “I want to be warned.”
“He’ll just think it’s funny.”
“Funny because I’m a girl or funny because it’s me?”
“Funny because it’s you.”
But Credence did not think it was funny. He called my having sex with Jimmy unscrupulous dabbling. Apparently, his time with her made him some kind of gender cowboy while mine just made me irresponsible. We got into an argument over which stance was more unenlightened, getting into bisexual relationships with lesbians (viewpoint Credence) or treating lesbians like incapable children who will automatically fall in love with you just because you are woman (viewpoint Della). I admit sleeping with Jimmy was lazy, though. Kind of like dating your cousin because you already know all the same people.
Annette didn’t care. She just wanted to be the one to tell my parents. We all agreed the joy of my potential gayness would kill them. First, black grandchildren and now the fantasy of two women on the couch at family gatherings (entwined and laughing as if it were all going to be okay). Yes, they would finally be dead from politically informed glee. And, most importantly, the Bobbsey Twins of Labor Unrest though unable to rescue the PUBLIC from the slander of BIG GOVERNMENT would be placed in an historical context where the primacy of class had naturally yielded to its more ornamental, if secondary features: race and gender.
Annette said the only thing better would be if one of us went to prison.
“But you know, the next time you date a boy Grace is going to accuse you of exercising heterosexual privilege.”
“Jimmy will be in Honduras before I see them.”
“The anniversary is next week.”
The green fans of the katydids fluttered.
“She could come to that.”
I looked at Credence. “I’m not going.”
Annette turned and walked into the kitchen.
Every year I say I’m not going.
When I first got hired at the restaurant Mirror asked about my parents.
“So, Della,” she said, swallowing a chunk of raw tofu the size of a golf ball, “Jimmy says your parents are pretty fringe. Were they like total hippies? ”
“No. My parents blew up hippies.”
“For fucking real?” she threw the rest of the tofu into the trash. “Did they really blow up hippies?”
“No. But they would have if they thought it was necessary for the revolution.”
She thought about it for a second.
“Wow. That’s intense. What are they like now?”
“Pretty much the same.”
“That’s cool,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron, “I’d blow up a hippy if I had to too.”
Grace and Miro. The serrated edge of an ongoing revolution cutting its way through a thicket of injustice. Going out to their place once a year for the anniversary was the one thing asked of us. None of us ever said no, I’m not going. Which is what I told Credence that morning, which is why, without asking me, he called Jimmy and invited her to come. Being a good organizer is about manipulation after all. By the time Jimmy called me, Credence already had her committed to bring the vegan pineapple-lemon cake.
“Oh, Grace will love it,” he told her.
Grace hates veganism. She calls it an elitist enclave for white people to lie to themselves about their role in the cycle of consumption. But that didn’t matter. At the end of the day, Jimmy had taken the time off work, bought a book for Grace and Miro on permaculture, and wrapped it in re-plantable wildflower paper.
When I found out what Credence did, I slammed the door even though no one else was home. Way to drive turnout, Credence, you get a prize. What s
hould it be? A papier-mâché head of John the Baptist? A tour map to the Rat Graveyard?
My cell phone buzzed and I didn’t answer.
I stared at the white flags pinned on my wall where I’d been tracking a wave of immolations along the coast of France. I adjusted a pin. The flags bothered Credence, but not like talk of the box-mall-church. A few months ago I got lost in an industrial field behind there. I was trying to map the social events and boundaries that had turned our architectural vocabulary into drive-thru Christianity and free checking. More than that, I was trying to prove there is an end to it, but there isn’t. It’s endless. I had hoped to make an Aerial Map of the Carnage but it was beyond me. That night a bomb woke me up. Credence said it wasn’t possible. That it was across the ocean and wasn’t even ours. But everything’s ours. The outside world is nothing anymore, just a franchise of nations.
I promised Credence I would never go to the box-mall-church again.
6 Aerial Map of the Carnage
On the bus out to the box-mall-church I counted rings of urban growth. Clouds burned off and new streets ticked by on my right, Car Parts Lane, Value Town Outlet Parkway, Pay Day Loan Road, Bank of Nations Plaza and Paul of Damascus Court. On my left was the long and windowless side of the box-mall-church. When it was built, a narrow road still ran between the mall and the church. But traffic bottlenecked so they built new roads and turned the old one into a covered pedestrian walkway connecting the buildings.
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