What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  “So, Hue, we’ll work it out, right?” she said apologetically.

  “Sure. I do this all the time. No problem.”

  Of course, Tuyen thought, realizing that apart from their floating animosity she really did not know her brother well. She had created an archetype of him, and there it stood.

  “Great. So, my brother treats you okay, does he?” Tuyen tried joking, but it sounded lame even to herself.

  “Yes.” Hue giggled.

  “Hue, can I talk to Binh in private for a second?”

  “Sure.” The girl took her purse and went outside. Tuyen watched her rummage for a cigarette, light it, and lean on the window, smoking.

  “She seems nice.”

  Binh didn’t answer. He arranged the receipts in the cash drawer, then said, “You know how to work this, right?”

  They both knew how to work a cash register. For a moment they were back in the restaurant as children, self-important and studious. For a moment she felt a comfort with him, accompanied.

  “Yeah, I know. But listen, what are you going to do exactly?”

  “Well, Ma’s been ripped off for years. Both of them. So I’m going to track him down one way the other.”

  “But why? He’s probably dead and probably died a long time ago. He was so small and …”

  “So they need to know.”

  “And if he’s not dead, then he has a life.”

  “So they need to know. You don’t see them.”

  Compassion wasn’t a feeling she thought her brother experienced.

  “But suppose it only brings them trouble.”

  “How?”

  She couldn’t answer well. “I don’t know. Maybe if he’s alive, he’s a shit, you know.”

  “You were never afraid of anything. How come you’re afraid of this?”

  Her brother’s assessment took her aback, both in terms of how he saw her and how he appraised her feelings now.

  “I’m not afraid for me,” she said, feeling dishonest.

  The truth was, she didn’t want to be drawn into a family drama. Binh, she thought, always wanted some kind of touching, even if it was painful. He always sought out the rawness of human contact, the veins exposed. She wanted to leave well enough alone. She was content to witness at a distance, to go over the bones dispassionately. She looked at Binh now, thinking that in some ways her brother was more sensitive and she more ready, more needy, and all the calculation that she had ascribed to him was probably not so hard core after all.

  He was saying, “I’m not going to let them get fucked over, you know. First of all, I’m not telling them about it, in case it doesn’t work out.”

  Selflessness was another attribute she knew her brother definitely didn’t have. He must have told Bo already, otherwise why had Bo hinted something of it to her? She decided not to reveal this to Binh, let him think she didn’t know.

  “Well, you gonna do it anyway, so …”

  “Yes.”

  “Do not bring trouble, Binh. The danger of the sky is that we cannot climb up into it.”

  Tuyen heard herself saying what her father said to them when they were growing up. Binh laughed at her.

  “I didn’t know you were so old-fashioned. Speaking of which, you can take a coat off the rack in the back if you want.”

  “I like my coat fine. Your girlfriend looks like she’s freezing. Too small for me, if you ask.”

  “I didn’t ask, and don’t try to fuck around with her.”

  “Scared?”

  “Anyways!”

  Hue had finished her cigarette and was looking at them through the window.

  “Not my type,” Tuyen joked. Binh beckoned to Hue to come in.

  “So, Hue, see you next week, will I? Here’s my number. How long is this for anyway, Binh?”

  “Ten days, maybe.”

  “Okay, we’ll hold it down, right, Hue? So, later.”

  She left, feeling a mix of pleasure and discomfort. She had at least paid a debt, owned her brother as “mine” to a greater extent than she thought she could. She had at least left without biting at him. But she was apprehensive about what this journey to find their brother would open up in their lives, her life.

  She wrapped her too-big coat around her, walking slowly in the damp late-spring wind. The sun had been in and out all day. She could use a cigarette, quite frankly, she thought. Pleased as she was with herself, it had been a stretch of good behaviour. It was just like Binh to get everything in knots once she thought she was well away from her family. She passed two black men near a parking meter, one of them gesturing to the other.

  “A janela já foi consertada, ele só queria dinheiro. Eu não vou …”

  “Bom, ele nâo me disse isso. Eu tenho os canos de metal prontos …”

  Their voices spoke in another language—Spanish, she thought, no, it was Portuguese. An older woman, white, went by, looking at the men. Tuyen caught her dismay at their language. She said, “Spanish or Portuguese?” to the woman, catching her off guard again.

  “Portuguese!” the woman replied, the thickness of that accent underlying her own English. “You never know when you’re talking, other people could be listening.” The woman put her fingers to her lips, and Tuyen grinned.

  Yes, that was the beauty of this city, it’s polyphonic, murmuring. This is what always filled Tuyen with hope, this is what she thought her art was about—the representation of that gathering of voices and longings that summed themselves up into a kind of language, yet indescribable. Her art—she had pursued it to stave off her family—to turn what was misfortune into something else. She had devoted all the time to it, and here they were—her family—returning again and again.

  “Africa, I suppose?” The woman still engaged her.

  “Or Brazil.”

  “You never know, you have to be careful when you speak.”

  “ ‘Careful’? About what?” Tuyen asked, but the woman had already gone into a fruit store. “Hmm,” Tuyen sniffed. So much for unities.

  In the closing door of the fruit store she saw her own image. “I like this coat,” she said to herself. Her face was as unfamiliar as it always was to her when she caught herself in a mirror. Yet all her installations were filled with self-portraits, like Varo’s. Curious faces staring, in her case openly, even rudely. Varo’s face was mysterious, hers was inquisitive, candid. She would go along with Binh’s little project. She had no choice. “It is not in your hands,” she told her image in the glass door.

  That was mid-May, and Tuyen had every intention of following through with her promise to Binh. She went to the store to relieve Hue by 2 P.M. for the first few days. Hue was perfectly capable and more knowledgeable than she about Binh’s affairs. Tuyen realized that when Binh wasn’t there Hue’s voice was efficient and even bossy. She corrected Tuyen when Tuyen did something wrong, like pile gadgets on the counter, and she ran to serve customers before Tuyen discouraged them with her intrusive stares or probing questions. Left to Tuyen, the store would have made few sales.

  Her lubiao project was foremost in her mind, and she asked each customer, “What do you long for?” as they came into the store. The idea was to write these longings down and post them on the lubiao. Hue interrupted her each time, pushing the person toward the expensive electronics that Binh sold. Some customers were actually struck by the question. “Reading, a whole year to read,” one said. “To feel safer,” another said, “safe, like when I was a child.” A Somali man, who was a taxi driver, and who came in for a new radio, told Tuyen, “Enough money to go home and marry four wives.” Tuyen broke into laughter and so did the man.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, no, my uncle has five. He has a schedule. One night with one, the other night with another, and so on. He has a paper with all of it written down.”

  “And that’s what you long for?”

  “Yes, I would be very happy.”

  “And tired!”

  “No, no,” the man
laughed, “never tired.”

  After the Somali taxi driver left, Hue scolded her.

  “You can’t carry on conversations like that. Then people don’t buy anything. You’re chatting too much about irrelevant things.”

  “Oh, chill out, Hue. What do you long for?”

  “Not me. I don’t long for anything.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I have work to do. I can’t. That’s foolishness.”

  “You long for my brother.”

  “I’m not answering. You—you’re too chatty!”

  “All right, sell, sell, sell.” But she didn’t, she scribbled the taxi driver’s story in her notebook, sketching an image of him beside it, giggling to herself.

  This book she called her book of longings. She had happened on the idea of collecting these stories when she found the signed photograph, “Recuerdo de nuestra noche, 1968” at the ATM machine. The city was full of longings and she wanted to make them public.

  A Bengali woman had asked her, “Why long for anything? Longing is suffering. We have to stop desire. Desire nothing.” Tuyen accosted people on the street as well as in the store, and the Bengali woman was waiting for her daughter outside an ice cream parlour. They watched the Bengali woman’s daughter buy an ice cream and lick it deliciously.

  “Now she’ll be sick with that. Lactose intolerant. See what desire is?” the woman said. “I would like better knees,” she confided, pointing to her heavily wrapped knees under her sari. “But what to do, eh? To desire is to suffer.”

  What did she herself desire? What did she long for? A bigger studio, Carla, another family: yes, all along she had wished that her family was different.

  Tuyen came to the store on the third or fourth day to find Elliott and the other man talking with Hue. Conversation stopped when she entered.

  “Well, don’t mind me,” she said.

  “They were going.”

  “Elliott, what’re you up to?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Some stock for Binh, in the back.”

  The other guy looked impatient and said something to Hue in Vietnamese to which Hue agreed. He ignored Tuyen and spoke to Elliott—“Let’s go, I’m busy.” Elliott seemed no longer interested in Tuyen, and they both left.

  “What was that about?”

  “Just business.”

  “Business? Shouldn’t I know what the business is?”

  Hue looked bored and headed into an explanation of how many electronic cards of RAM memory were ordered and how many computer cables, an explanation so deliberately tedious that Tuyen raised her hand, begging off. Let them have their complications, she thought, what do I care? She got her book of longings out and waited for the next customer to come in. Opening the book while Hue hovered busily, she saw Carla’s longing. “Sleep. A deep, dreamless sleep. Totally knocked out. The kind of sleep that feels like food and when you get up you feel new.” Tuyen had written below, “Mine: to be seduced, utterly seduced. By you.” It was so strange, she thought, how people see qualities in other people—things that probably aren’t there at all. She, for example, saw something deeply seductive in Carla, something Carla didn’t see—it always baffled Tuyen. Jackie would tease her, “The girl is not home, honey.”

  Lost in her book of longings, Tuyen only looked up when Hue said loudly, “I’m leaving now.”

  Tuyen took her head out of the book to see Hue pacing indecisively.

  “Okay, see you tomorrow.”

  “I don’t like that one,” Hue blurted out.

  “Who—Elliott? He’s harmless.”

  “No, the other guy. If he comes back, don’t talk to him.”

  “Why would he come back? For what?”

  “Whatever, don’t talk to him.”

  “Well, I’ve nothing to say to him anyway.”

  Hue still seemed reluctant to leave. “He runs girls. He calls it a spa.”

  This was more than Tuyen had got out of Hue on any subject, and she hadn’t even asked.

  “Really?” The curiosity in her voice seemed to propel Hue to the door. As if she had said too much.

  “See you tomorrow, then.”

  Tuyen followed her to the door. “Is Binh in on that too?”

  “Of course not! I just don’t like that guy, that’s all.” And she escaped out the door.

  Okay, Tuyen thought, something else I don’t want to know about. Binh probably had his finger in it somewhere, but thank heavens her brother had a very healthy sense of self-preservation. At the back of the store was evidence of that. While XS sold mainly computer parts and other electronics, there were boxes of men’s clothing, office supplies, shoes, lamps, clocks, and anything Binh could get cheaply just to diversify his investment in the store. Oddly, Tuyen had thought that once she was alone in the store she would have rifled through Binh’s affairs to see what he was up to generally—but she hadn’t felt the urge to do it. And even now, with Hue’s unsolicited declaration about Binh’s shady friend, she was still completely uninterested. Besides, she thought, Binh was not stupid, he wouldn’t leave any damaging evidence around.

  Her intrigues with her brother were lodged in their childhood and so too her suspicions. They were both grown up and probably quite different people, just people unable to let go of a childhood game. What did Binh long for? That was obvious. To be the only boy. No, again that was the only trajectory of thought that their relationship led her to. He probably longed for something quite different. She promised herself to ask him. Maybe it was she who longed to be the only daughter.

  Enough psychoanalysis, she told herself, and enough of this scene. She suddenly decided to close the store early and go to the studio. She pushed the book of longings into her bag, made a mental note that Hue had already emptied the cash, and locked the door behind her. She breathed in relief. She didn’t know how people held on to that kind of work, rather, she told herself, she knew how but not why. Why wake up every day to slug it out at some mundane, numbing, repetitive small act? Why be satisfied with that alone, and happy—some people were happy with it.

  Heading home, she looked at the city around her. Now, in fact, she noticed lots of people like her staring idly into store windows, sitting in doughnut shops, touching fruit in outside fruit stands, washing clothes in the laundromats, reading newspapers. Tuyen stopped into the Bubble Tea Café and ordered a coffee, took out her book, and waited for someone to sit near her to ask them what they longed for.

  It’s like this with this city—you can stand on a simple corner and get taken away in all directions. Depending on the weather, it can be easy or hard. If it’s pleasant, and pleasant is so relative, then the other languages making their way to your ears, plus the language of the air itself, which can be cold and humid or wet and hot, this all sums up into a kind of new vocabulary. No matter who you are, no matter how certain you are of it, you can’t help but feel the thrill of being someone else.

  She called Hue the next afternoon at the store to ask if Hue really did need her to come and if everything was all right. She had become caught up in how she was going to execute the collection of longings. She thought of glass, small glass pieces on which the longings could be written and which she would then embed in the lubiao; or should she use paper, perhaps in newsprint, or if only she had the technology, tiny video enactments, or … At any rate, Hue said that she did not mind at all, and one day led to the other and Tuyen promised that for the rest of the time she would call in until Binh returned, but if Hue really needed her, she should call her. It wasn’t that she had lost interest in Binh’s project of finding their brother, it was just she pushed her initial anxiety about it away, thinking that (a) it was highly improbable that Binh would find him; (b) if he did, she would deal with that when it happened; but (c) the chances were so remote; and (d) what was she getting so freaked out about? Binh was off doing the nasty in Thailand. He would return, tell their parents he went looking, get credit for being a good son, and put their minds at rest that everything possibl
e had finally been done, but it was all their fate …

  So perhaps cloth; she had decided on cloth. She had strung a huge diaphanous grey-white piece against a wall and was using a calligraphic pen to transfer in her fine handwriting the entries from her book. After several hours of work, she happened on the idea to insert her mother’s letter into the cloth. Of course! She felt a surge of creative recognition that the idea had begun somehow from there. Pen poised, she taxed her memory for the first one she’d read when she heard from the open doorway, “No luck, after all.” She was startled to see Binh in her studio.

  He never came up here. He looked dejected. She was uncomfortable. There was a kind of intimacy in his coming to her place that she found alarming. And an intimacy in his look of disappointment.

  “You mean, you didn’t find him? Well, what did you expect?”

  “He exists, he can be found.”

  “But I keep asking you, why? Why do you have to find him? Who cares?”

  “They do.”

  “Why didn’t they go looking themselves? Long ago then?”

  “How can you ask that? They couldn’t leave here … they were scared … they were refugees.… You have no pity.”

  “Look, I think they need to forget it. Not forget, but make peace with it. Why do you want to start it up again?”

  Binh stared a while at the grey-white hanging cloth on Tuyen’s wall. He read the longings she’d written there.

  “So you—you only care about other people. Look at that crap! And look at all this shit on your floor. We’re not Chinese, eh! You’re always pretending. People are real, eh? They’re not just something in your head. You always play around as if everything is a joke. You don’t care about nobody, just yourself.”

  “You care about the wrong things. You always did. I know people are real, but everything isn’t fate. They taught us that, but it isn’t true.” She heard herself having the first conversation she could remember with Binh where there wasn’t raw animosity. “I still don’t get what you’re doing.”

  “You weren’t the boy. You didn’t get the shit. I want to find him. Let them see who he is, then maybe they’ll get off of my back.”