Go Home!

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  He was smart and funny, and had literary aspirations that we sometimes talked about on the nights we drank wine late into the night in his room, which was also the living room. I was happy for a while there. I could count on one hand the number of hapa gay men I’d met back then, and of those, even fewer of them were literary. Each time I met one it was like we were from a homeland that had never existed, but that if we collected enough of each other, maybe it would. But we never said this, or, I never did, it was just something I felt. I liked being like him, and I wanted to be more like him, to be as sultry, as bitter, as funny in the same way—and as beautiful.

  When I found out he wanted to be a writer, it made me proud somehow. As much as I wanted to be like him, it surprised me to learn he wanted to be a little like me too.

  At times, while drinking wine, he would confess things to me. The first confession was that he was terribly disfigured. A motorcycle accident in Los Angeles, he assured me, had ended his career as a model and actor. I couldn’t tell. His face and body were both still beautiful, as far as I could see, and I could see no scars. When I told him, he laughed bitterly. “You can see it in pictures,” he assured me. When he showed me photos of him as he had been, I scrutinized them carefully, but he looked . . . the same. “A really good plastic surgeon was at the emergency room,” he then said. “You know. Thank God it was LA.”

  Yes, I remember thinking. Thank LA too.

  NEXT HE TOLD me he had steroids he took to stay thin without working out, as he hated working out, pills he got from a doctor he saw in that room and who paid him in prescriptions. Soon the doctor was revealed to be the doctor who had worked on his face. Then I learned that the friend who had recommended me to him was also a client. There was a story he was telling me in installments, but the installments felt like windows that could not show the whole story—the real story was in what he did and did not say.

  The kitchen was right before his room. I never heard much when it was happening, and he kept the door closed if I was home while he had clients. As a courtesy to him I tried not to be, though—and as the neighborhood was full of bookstores, it was easy. His work didn’t bother me—it was a little funny to me, like living in the front room of a brothel in the most boring way.

  He was blithe about his work, as if it didn’t matter that he did this kind of work. As if it were only funny that he did this—he liked to make jokes. But I soon understood, in his mind, the accident had foreclosed on a more lucrative modeling and acting career, and this work was what he could do now, the one way he could still make money off his looks. Most of the time he maintained an air of devilishness, but here and there, rage appeared, only in the eyes of the very still, very beautiful, allegedly destroyed face.

  Every so often he would take out the photos of himself from before the accident, showing me, in something like a ritual, asking me again to see the difference that I could not see.

  Gradually I understood that it didn’t matter that he was still beautiful. Not to him. Not if every time he looked in the mirror he saw a stranger, someone who was going to fail him and his future. A replacement left behind by the accident.

  HE BROUGHT HOME a dog a few months after I moved in, a short squat blond mutt, part Corgi, part terrier of some kind, golden and seemingly placid, going blind. I don’t remember why, but soon after, he said he didn’t want the dog anymore. By then the dog and I had grown attached to each other, and so I said I’d take the dog.

  The dog woke from a nap on my bed one afternoon and snarled once before it leaped at me, attaching itself to my cheek, biting deep. I grabbed its throat reflexively, and it let go. At the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, I waited in the emergency room to be told the wounds were puncture wounds and could not be sewn, only treated with salves and bandaged. So I was treated, given oral antibiotics and painkillers, an enormous bandage for my left cheek, and then I was released.

  When I got home, my roommate had had it destroyed. He finally showed me the papers for the dog, which I’d not seen before the accident, with the word UNADOPTABLE stamped across them.

  I DIDN’T STAY too much longer after that. I’ve never spoken to him again. I saw something of his in the Village Voice once, but by now only his face remains in my memory, his name lost to me.

  The only other way I remember him is in my face. I can tell when it’s going to rain now. I feel it in the scar, like a thumb pressing on the bone. When I do, I remember what the attending physician said. “It’s good you caught him at the throat. This could have been much worse.” Then he explained that if you’re ever being attacked by a dog, try to catch and pull the front legs apart. This splits their breastbone open, incapacitating them. Though it seems to me to bring the dog’s face unacceptably close. I am sure I could never do it, and I’m happy I’ve never had to try. But then I no longer, despite my love of dogs, let them lick my face.

  My face is a stranger to me now, even all these years later. I tell people the story and ask if they can see the difference, and everyone says, “You can’t tell.” But I can. I never used to believe him about his face but I do now.

  If I ever see him again, I’ll tell him.

  Things That Remind Me of Home

  Kimiko Hahn

  after Sei Shōnagon

  moth balls

  turpentine, curried chicken in the pressure cooker, gardenia—

  From the living room, the sound of her Singer [Cast Iron, 1895] [same year her father was born in Hiroshima-ken]. The speed of the tapping depended on her knee pressure. Mother sewed doll clothes from her own dress hems. For me.

  the taste of sumi-e ink

  kitty litter box nest to the black phone mulch

  transistor radio, car radio, record player

  My student misses home, a “res” out west. “Every boulder and plant has a story and the story is about origin. About home.” I am never homesick for places—only people.

  Mr. Cook—retired Chinese merchant marine so-named by our super—sees me as I walk by an OTB on Ninth Avenue. This is years after I’ve moved out of our shabby apartment building on West 105th St. but he immediately recognizes me. He waves and hurries up to me, saying, “My wife, she went home.” Yes. Home. Ashes.

  “Show me your green card.”

  Mr. C. stuffed his two-bedroom apartment full of newspapers, Playbills, photographs of stars and of himself, shoes from every photo shoot he’d been on, his wife’s dresses over their thirty-two-year marriage, and so on. To meet him in the elevator, one would think, “A nice tidy eccentric who plays rabbis or wizards in adverts.” Unless you looked at his limp black jacket, dandruff and mustard on his lapel. When the landlord told him to clean out or clear out, they got a dumpster. He died three months later.

  A bar in Charleston, West Virginia, 1981, the man next to me says, “Where you from?” I say, “New York.” He asks again and I smile and repeat, “I’m from New York.” He says, “You look like a girl I knew in Saigon.”

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

  They have to take you in.”

  “I should have called it

  Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”1

  お握り2

  Trudy

  Turpentine from those large orange and black cans. (But do these things convey home or homesick? I cannot tell the difference, it seems.)

  This is the kitchen where mother lifted me onto the porcelain sink and sponge-bathed me. In the 105th Street kitchen, I gave sponge baths to our little girls. (The kitchen where the linoleum curled up and cockroaches nested and startled when the light was turned on, the constant smell of them, even with the window open to the sooty outdoors.)

  Meggie and I cleared a space under the forsythia at the bottom of her driveway to eat Ritz crackers. Barbara and I dug out homes for our trolls in the gnarly hickory roots. Yesterday, Meena and I sipped martinis and she held my hand saying, “You must take care of yourself, dear Kimiko.”

  Deviled Ham

 
; 漬物3

  stairwell, the Rittenhouse Hotel, the floor of his office, café, car, dogwood, shower stall

  1.Excerpt of poetry from Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man.”

  2.お握り—onigiri—rice balls

  3.漬物—tsukemono—Japanese pickles

  Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying

  Alice Sola Kim

  At midnight we parked by a Staples and tried some seriously dark fucking magic. We had been discussing it for weeks and could have stayed in that wouldn’t it be funny if groove forever, zipping between yes, we should and no, we shouldn’t until it became a joke so dumb that we would never. But that night Mini had said, “If we don’t do it right now, I’m going to be so mad at you guys, and I’ll know from now on that all you chickenheads can do is talk and not do,” and the whole way she ranted at us like that, even though we were already doing and not talking, or at least about to. (We always let her do that, get all shirty and sharp with us, because she had the car, but perhaps we should have said something. Perhaps once everyone had cars, Mini would have to figure out how to not be a total bitch, and she would be leagues behind everyone else.)

  The parking lot at night looked like the ocean, the black Atlantic as we imagined it, and in Mini’s car we brought up the spell on our phones and Caroline read it first. She always had to be first to do anything, because she had the most to prove, being scared of everything. We couldn’t help but tease her about that, even though we knew it wasn’t her fault—her parents made her that way, but then again, if someone didn’t get told for being a pill just because we could trace said pill-ness back to their parents, then where would it ever end?

  We had an X-Acto knife and a lighter and antibacterial ointment and lard and a fat red candle still shrink-wrapped. A chipped saucer from Ronnie’s dad’s grandmother’s wedding set, made of china that glowed even in dim light and sang when you rubbed your thumb along it, which she took because it was chipped and thought they wouldn’t miss it, but we thought that was dumb because they would definitely miss the chipped one. The different one. We could have wrapped it all up and sold it as a Satanism starter kit.

  Those were the things. What we did with them we’ll never tell. For a moment, it seemed like it would work. The moment stayed the same, even though it should have changed. A real staring contest of a moment: Ronnie’s face shining in the lunar light of her phone, the slow tick of the blood into the saucer, like a radiator settling. But Mini ruined it. “Do you feel anything?” asked Mini, too soon and too loudly. We glanced at each other, dismayed. We thought, perhaps if she had just waited a little longer—“I don’t think so,” said Ronnie. “I knew this was a dumb idea,” said Mini. “Let’s clean up this blood before it gets all over my car. So if one of you got murdered, they wouldn’t blame me.” Caroline handed out the Band-Aids. She put hers on and saw the blood well up instantly against the Band-Aid, not red or black or any color in particular, only a dark splotch like a shape under ice. So much for that, everyone thought, wrong.

  MINI DROPPED CAROLINE off first, even though she lived closer to Mini, then Ronnie after. It had been this way always. At first Caroline had been hurt by this, had imagined that we were talking about her in the fifteen extra minutes of alone time that we shared. The truth was both a relief and an even greater insult. There was nothing to say about Caroline, no shit we would talk that wasn’t right to her face. We loved Caroline, but her best jokes were unintentional. We loved Caroline, but she didn’t know how to pretend to be cool and at home in strange places like we did; she was the one who always seemed like a pie-faced country girleen wearing a straw hat and holding a suitcase, asking obvious questions like, “Wait, which hand do you want to stamp?” or “Is that illegal?” Not that the answers were always obvious to us, but we knew what not to ask about. We knew how to be cool, so why didn’t Caroline?

  Usually, we liked to take a moment at the end of the night without Caroline, to discuss the events of the night without someone to remind us how young we were and how little we knew. But tonight we didn’t really talk. We didn’t talk about how we believed, and how our belief had been shattered. We didn’t talk about the next time we would hang out. Ronnie snuck into her house. Her brother, Alex, had left the window open for her. Caroline was already in bed, wearing an ugly quilted headband that kept her bangs off her face so she wouldn’t get forehead zits. Mini’s mom wasn’t home yet, so she microwaved some egg rolls. She put her feet up on the kitchen table, next to her homework, which had been completed hours ago. The egg rolls exploded tiny scalding droplets of water when she bit into them. She soothed her seared lips on a beer. This is the life, Mini thought.

  We didn’t go to the same school, and we wouldn’t be friends if we had. We met at an event for Korean adoptees, a low-ceilinged party at a community center catered with the stinkiest food possible. Koreans, amirite?! That’s how we/they roll.

  Mini and Caroline were having fun. Ronnie was not having fun. Mini’s fun was different from Caroline’s fun, being a fake-jolly fun in which she was imagining telling her real friends about this doofus loser event later, although due to the fact that she was reminding them that she was adopted, they would either squirm with discomfort or stay very still and serious and stare her in the pupils with great intensity, nodding all the while. Caroline was having fun—the pure uncut stuff, nothing ironic about it. She liked talking earnestly with people her age about basic biographical details because there was a safety in conversational topics that no one cared about all that much. Talking about which high school you go to? Great! Which activities you did at aforementioned school? Raaaad. Talking about the neighborhood where you live? How was it possible that they weren’t all dead of fun! Caroline already knew and liked the K-pop soundtracking the evening, the taste of the marinated beef and the clear noodles, dishes that her family recreated on a regular basis.

  Ronnie rooted herself by a giant cut-glass bowl full of kimchi, which looked exactly like a big wet pile of fresh guts. She soon realized that (1) the area by the kimchi was very high traffic, and (2) the kimchi emitted a powerful vinegar-poop-death stench. As Ronnie edged away from the food table, Mini and Caroline were walking toward it. Caroline saw a lost and lonely soul and immediately said, “Hi! Is this your first time at a meet-up?”

  At this Ronnie experienced split consciousness, feeling annoyed that she was about to be sucked into wearying small talk, in addition to a nearly sacramental sense of gratitude about being saved from standing alone at a gathering. You could even say that Ronnie was experiencing quadruple consciousness if you counted the fact that she was both judging and admiring Mini and Caroline—Mini for being the kind of girl who tries to look ugly on purpose and thinks it looks so great (ooh, except it did look kinda great), her torn sneakers and one thousand silver earrings and chewed-up hair, and Caroline of the sweetly tilted eyes and cashmere sweater dress and ballet flats like she was some pampered cat turned human.

  Mini had a stainless-steel water bottle full of ice and vodka cut with the minimal amount of orange juice. She shared it with Ronnie and Caroline. And Caroline drank it. Caroline ate and drank like she was a laughing twodimensional cutout and everything she consumed just went through her face and evaporated behind her, affecting her not at all.

  Ronnie could not stop staring at Caroline, who was a one-woman band of laughing and drinking and ferrying food to her mouth and nodding and asking skin-rippingly boring questions that nevertheless got them talking. Ronnie went from laughing at Caroline to being incredibly jealous of her. People got drunk just to be like Caroline!

  Crap, Ronnie thought. Social graces are actually worth something.

  But Caroline was getting drunk, and since she was already Caroline, she went too far with the whole being Caroline thing and asked if she could tell us a joke. Only if we promised not to get offended!

  Mini threw her head back, smiled condescendingly at an imaginary person to her left, and said, “Of cour
se.” She frowned to hide a burp that was, if not exactly a solid, still alarmingly substantial, and passed the water bottle to Ronnie.

  Caroline wound up. This had the potential to be long. “So, you know how—oh wait, no, okay, this is how it starts. Okay, so white people play the violin like this.” She made some movements. “Black people play it like this.” She made some more movements. “And then Korean people play it like th—“ and began to bend at the waist but suddenly farted so loudly that it was like the fart had bent her, had then jet-packed her into the air and crumpled her to the ground. She tried to talk over it, but Ronnie and Mini were ended by their laughter. They fell out of themselves. They were puking laughter, the laughter was a thick brambly painful rope being pulled out of their faces, but they couldn’t stop it, and finally Caroline stopped trying to finish the joke and we were all laughing.

  CONSEQUENCES: FOR DAYS after, we would think that we had exhausted the joke and sanded off all the funniness, rubbing it so often with our sweaty fingers, but then we would remember again and, whoa, there we went again, off to the races.

  Consequences: summer arrived. Decoupled from school, we were free to see one another, to feel happy misfitting with one another because we knew we were peas from different pods—we delighted in being such different kinds of girls from one another.

  Consequences: for weeks after, we’d end sentences with, “Korean people do it like ppppbbbbbbbttth.”

  THERE ARE SO many ways to miss your mother. Your real mother—the one who looks like you, the one who has to love you because she grew you from her own body, the one who hates you so much that she dumped you in the garbage for white people to pick up and dust off. In Mini’s case, it manifested as some weird gothy shit. She had been engaging in a shady flirtation with a clerk at an antiquarian bookshop. We did not approve. We thought this clerk wore thick-rimmed hipster glasses to hide his crow’s feet and hoodies to hide his man boobs so that weird high school chicks would still want to flirt with him. We hoped that Mini mostly only liked him because he was willing to trade clammy glances with her and go no further. Unlike us, Mini was not a fan of going far. When the manager wasn’t around, this guy let her go into the room with the padlock on it, where all of the really expensive stuff was. That’s where she found the book with the spell. That’s where she took a photo of the spell with her phone. That’s where she immediately texted it to us without any explanation attached, confident that the symbols were so powerful they would tentacle through our screens and into our hearts, and that we would know it for what it was.