by Lindsay Wong
Wobin was also born with an electronically fried voice, so no one could understand what she was saying. My job was to tutor Wobin and wheel her to the bathroom to change her sanitary napkin and to the downstairs cafeteria whenever she had an insatiable craving for poutine. Unable to hold a fork, she’d regularly spill gravy-wet french fries and molten-looking cheese curds onto her lap. I am ashamed to say now: at first, I was afraid of Wobin, so I made excuses when she asked me to help her clean up.
Grudgingly, I accepted what I thought was my personal punishment project, one for which I wouldn’t be paid or earn nearly enough high school credit. But I quickly realized that Wheelchair Wobin could help me achieve personal goals: time with Wobin included skipped classes and complimentary slurpees from the lunch ladies. I learned that Wobin loved junk food and hated classes as much as I did. And Wobin was a bright girl; she knew that people would always give her whatever she wanted because she was stuck in a wheelchair. Like me, like my mother and her family, she had learned how to survive her vulnerability—through bargaining. Immediately, I could relate.
Most teachers took one panicked look at Wobin’s large head, her fluttering eyelids, and gave her preferential treatment—Wobin would put on the disabled act if she knew it’d get us both out of a math quiz, sometimes going so far as to stick out her tongue and scream obscenities as soon as we knew there would be a surprise test. “ASSHOLE!” Wobin wheeze-yelled; it didn’t matter what she said—she could be reciting a scientific equation, whispering a sappy Shakespearean sonnet—it would sound excitingly obscene if you didn’t have your ear close to her mouth. It was so incredibly difficult for Wobin to string together a phrase or speak in anything other than a murmur, so whenever she hollered in her garbled computer voice, the startled teachers would quickly send us outside for a walk.
In exchange for putting on her “special act” whenever I requested it, I just had to finish Wobin’s homework. As her tutor, I made sure that Wobin, who read at a fifth-grade level, improved, and the teachers complimented me on my newfound teaching ability. Although I’d never admit it, Wheelchair Wobin could help me finish the school year without getting into too much trouble. We were friends, but I knew I was using her, the same way that she used me to help haul food from the cafeteria. What else, anyway, was friendship?
It turned out that I did need a friend that year. When I was in tenth grade Hongcouver’s provincial government and the Ministry of Education issued an experimental psychology and personality test so we could begin to be grouped into special academic classes and prepare for our future careers. It was an intensive month-long examination of answering simple multiple-choice questions and numbering situational narratives in order of preference—1 to 4, A to D.
I thought I had no future, and I failed spectacularly.
The results of this odd psych evaluation disturbed my father, who said, “What the fuck? Tell them you have to redo it. Why you flunk this test on purpose? Is your IQ minus ten? Negative fifty?”
The computer program had somehow decided I wasn’t suitable for any career, and I was surprised by the results. Not that I had been picky about vocations when I honestly answered the 300-plus questions, but not having a career path in mind had obviously been a problem for the software, which had produced strange advice:
Congratulations!
Top 3 Careers for Lindsay Wong:
1. Comedian
2. Mortician
3. Tattoo artist
If I had to choose a career from the computer-generated list, I preferred mortician. Morbidly, I thought that I could fix broken people without any long-term obligations, a new project every day of the week. Corpses had to be grateful that someone was making them perfect again, and I might do some good by helping clients who had misplaced half their faces. Besides, the school said I didn’t have any empathy, which I wouldn’t need if I was going to be working with people who were already deceased.
“Dead people won’t care if I’m empty,” I announced to my guidance counsellor, who looked at me strangely. I was good at walling off my most vulnerable emotions, but the irony here was that such a practice had caused me to feel even more vulnerable after being called out on it. I couldn’t stop thinking of myself as empty, empty, empty.
Like a true teenager, I rebelled against the nutrients suggested by any adult, in this case the empathy suggested by my guidance counsellor, and embraced a humdrum future to save my pride. Mortician and tattoo artist were basically the same profession, but I thought dead people were not fussy and I would probably lose my temper with a tattoo gun.
As a tenth-grader, both eccentric lifestyle choices seemed obsessive and autonomous enough for me. But my father complained to the school, and I was permanently excused from career planning.
I could never tell my parents about my Human Empathy Project. This would have horrified them in every way. My father would have demanded that I quit the school immediately. He felt that people like Wobin should be quarantined, because low IQ and unworkable limbs were contagious. He would have worried and screamed at all my teachers for selfishly endangering the country’s population.
I was scared for Wobin to ever meet him because I didn’t want her to get run over by our pickup truck. She epitomized vulnerability—the very human experience my parents had crossed continents to escape and were running from now. Wobin needed me to finish her homework, and like a parasite that needs intestines and a cozy stomach lining to survive, I needed Wobin to get me out of intensive classroom learning.
As the computer results confirmed, I was much too brainless for anything professional. And Wobin said it didn’t seem like she’d live very long, with her waxy skin and ninety-year-old-man slump, believing that she was already three-quarters dead at fourteen. She thought it was exciting and fortunate that we both didn’t have futures. We had been given official permission by the provincial government to do whatever we wanted. At this point, I was encouraging myself to magically think that I was as emotionally disabled as Wobin was physically—I was coat-tailing her excuse to see dimly into the future, because it seemed easier than growing. And because it was a new pleasure—likening myself to someone else.
Whenever Wobin talked about dying (the only future that everyone had been preparing her for since the doctors found out that she had linguistic ability), she said that she would like to come back as a ghost to punish her parents, and she wouldn’t be a boring poltergeist but a Japanese horror-movie spirit with swollen, red eyes who crawled out of televisions and household appliances. Now that was a future I found empowering.
It’s not like Wobin had any reason to believe her future could be other than ephemeral when any optimistic tendencies in her present life relied wholly on her imagination. Her parents were strict but lazy: on long weekends, excluding her birthday if it fell on a holiday, they made her wear a diaper and lie in bed for hours because they were too exhausted to wheel her to the bathroom. They also let her eat whatever she wanted and drink four gallons of Coke a day, believing that she could die any day now, so there wasn’t any point in trying to stay healthy.
“Last week, we had Pizza Hut every single night,” she boasted, and then proceeded to recite the chain’s entire menu, which she had memorized. I was jealous of her diet, but according to Wobin, she had the best and worst parents in the world.
Wobin believed that her purpose on earth was not only to devour frightening amounts of cafeteria poutine but also to make as much money as possible before she became a ghost. In movies, violent Japanese ghosts seemed to crawl everywhere using only their pale, insectoid arms, so she felt that she would do a fantastic job being hideous and scary, as her legs didn’t even work when she was alive.
“It’s, like, my destiny,” she declared, looking at me with her favourite eye. Wobin had one thin, slanted eye that she liked very much, and a lopsided marble-sized one that ogled the floor.
At first, I had resented looking after Wobin, but I soon saw the benefits. I would push her innocently t
hrough the cafeteria lineup and sneak a slimy hotdog or wet taco into my hoodie, while Wobin, on cue, would start screaming and slurring as soon as she caught the eye of a terrified-looking cafeteria lady.
Admittedly, we made exceptional horror villains: Wobin said that with my bad skin I resembled a surly ogre with leprosy, and I told her that she looked like a demure vampire monkey. Together, we were the fortunate recipients of a dozen complimentary bacon burgers, sometimes three extra cheesy pizzas, or a tray of yesterday’s Subway sandwiches—anything to make us leave as quickly as possible. Occasionally, we were sloppily bribed with buckets of lollipops and blue-and-white gummy strips that wound around our fingers like sugarcoated entrails. And after we had taken all we could carry, cackling to the wide-eyed cafeteria ladies that we would be back tomorrow at the same time, we would sit outside and divide our divine bounty.
We believed that we were repulsive and frightening and convinced ourselves that the world trembled at our twitchy, food-lifting fingers, that the cafeteria ladies were awed by our portentous appetites for greasy food. But mostly, I think, they felt sorry for us and let us get away with our ridiculous performance.
“Do people randomly come up to you and just give you money?” I asked Wobin once, when we were both feeling nauseated from overeating. I was supremely curious about how she always seemed to have excess cash, and I leaned in to hear her strangled reply.
“People give me money all the time,” Wobin said proudly, “especially in churches. I usually visit three different ones on Sundays. But Christmas is the best time for me. You get random people coming up to you and giving you twenties. You don’t know how much money I can make in this chair!”
“That’s so great!” I said, feeling happier and a little less queasy. Although I did not envy Wobin’s paralysis, I respected that she knew how to make money. I had been raised to believe that money was power, and here was Wobin, enticing me with the possibility that vulnerability could also be monetized—enhanced into power. If Wobin died tomorrow, or by the end of the week, I was determined to help her make at least 100 bucks, and I’d take a happy thirty-percent commission.
I thought about where we could go during lunch to meet the kinds of people who handed out stacks of glorious twenties; perhaps we could loiter outside a bank and pretend we were teenage beggars, instead of miserable privileged kids from the Poteau. There would be more chances that strangers had cash on them if I parked Wobin in front of an ATM. I would need to apply my future mortician skills by smearing dark makeup under our eyes, and Wobin would need to turn her brand-name clothes inside out. Hell, I could even give us both phony makeup bruises on our faces and arms, like we were freshly dead.
“Can you get us an early lunch on Friday?” I said, visualizing an empire of banks and sleek ATMs that we would monopolize and rule with our superior begging skills. I knew for certain that I would have received a high score in con artistry if the computer programming endorsed illegal activities.
“Hmmm,” Wobin wheezed, shoving three oily chicken fingers into her mouth and offering me the one that she had dropped into her lap. “Can you finish all my socials homework and my essay for French? Just get me a C minus or a C and we have a deal.”
I should have known my days of skipping school and gorging on cafeteria food were over when I stopped feeling anxious and paranoid. I should have known to always glance over my shoulder. Because whenever I wasn’t worrying about whatever superficial calm the universe had deigned to bestow on me was when trouble came out of nowhere.
I was cheerfully shoving lukewarm nachos into my mouth, waiting for Wobin to finish what she called her Special Ed Death Class (to prepare her for an early purgatory), and got slimy cheese sauce up my nostrils when Demeter and her Titans jumped me. She was furious about the mandatory “vacation” we had both taken, and her overseas mafia parents did not like that the principal had scolded their do-nothing-wrong daughter. I didn’t even have a chance to decently hit back—one against four. A chaotic, headachy, vomiting blur. The hallmark of my disempowerment.
I like to think that I punched someone with great enthusiasm, but when I lost my balance, someone, maybe sneaky Demeter, kicked me in the forehead. Curling up on the ground, I did my best not to cry, because only Woo-Woo people like my mother and grandmother wailed through their eyeballs. I gritted my teeth, bit my tongue, and thought of how I would not even scream if Demeter and her gang shattered my legs.
But a few ghostly tears began to leak out, which I prayed were snot. I could not afford to get possessed, to become hysterical and raw like my mother. Even though I knew that mental illness was a ghostly superstition, being vulnerable, and therefore weak, was not a state that I could indulge. When I would first become paralyzed in New York City, face down on the dirty sidewalk, I was so afraid to look vulnerable that I prayed no one would look at me. It was the Upper West Side, so everyone left me alone.
Nearly passing out from the exertion of squeezing in my tears, I ended up being sent home after a horrified teacher found me drooling in fetal position on the hallway floor.
Luckily, it is a universal truth that rich girls do not hit excessively hard. It’s the petty middle-class ones that you have to watch out for.
It was also lucky that I had lost, because the next day the principal agreed to make the incident disappear from my permanent record, provided I took “time off to reflect.” There were no witnesses, and he wasn’t sure if I had started the fight given “the violent history between the girls,” he said, looking flummoxed. But I think he felt sorry for me, and as a small, bald, egg-headed man, he looked as if he might have been bullied his entire life.
Was there anyone who wanted to help me, who actually could?
My parents were called in to speak to the principal and pick me up from school. My mother did not react, but I passively sulked while my father complained that he was losing money every minute that he was away from work. I kept my face like concrete, in case I betrayed any of my feelings.
“The principal talk too slow on purpose!” my father shouted, while my insides cringed. “One-hour meeting take three hour! He think we don’t speak English or something?”
My dictator of a Russian piano tutor (a former head of the Moscow Conservatory and a Bolshevik), whom I saw twice a week, counselled me during a three-hour music session to start another fight as soon as I was allowed back.
“What the hell were you thinking? I heard from Mommy you got beat up today,” she said in her phlegmy Russian accent, clearly miffed that I did not win. She had expected better of me and was disappointed that I hadn’t given anyone a bloody nose or a hairline fracture. “Why did you not punch her? What if those idiot broke your finger and no more piano?”
She was proof enough that it wasn’t only my family’s culture that used rage to overcompensate for pain. But I wasn’t looking for life lessons, or even piano ones.
“Shut up,” I said, feeling monstrously ill. I hated losing, but looking weak and ungainly made me ache with weakness and worry. And back then, it was also in my nature to crudely dismiss her since she liked to give me advice, but our piano lesson was charged by the hour.
“I want to work on Debussy now.”
Hey, where’s Robin?” I asked my guidance counsellor one day when I was allowed back to school to pick up my homework assignments. I was planning on asking Wobin if she wanted to skip Special Ed Death Class and head to the mall to shovel down hot fudge sundaes from McDonald’s.
“She’s been transferred to a special needs school,” the counsellor said, handing me a thick binder.
“Which school?” I asked, stunned.
“I don’t know,” the counsellor said, shrugging. “It’s not in our district.”
As I left the guidance office and slowly trudged to the mall’s food court alone, I thought about Wobin. I had spent a month developing a superior con-artist partnership with Wheelchair Wobin and had not been entirely grateful for the skipped classes and free cafeteria food. But wit
hout me diligently finishing her homework, Wobin would eventually fall behind in her classes. What had I expected?
Since I did not know how to make friends, I did not realize Wobin had been the closest thing I had to one, though we were never friends in the typical sense. We did not hang out or speak outside of school; I did not even have her cell number or email address. All I knew was her class schedule, her preference for anything deep-fried, and that she owed me $7.50.
I was deeply disappointed that she was gone. And I was almost as sad that I had been sent back to the surreal emptiness of the Belcarra, where I was getting a first-rate education in dangerous Chinese ghosts.
Since my inappropriate behaviour in kindergarten, when I bashed other kids in the brain with books and chopped off braids with scissors, I would be on school number six and running out of institutions in the district. And who knew if there would ever be another scheming Wheelchair Wobin who just wanted to make money off strangers and gobble poutine with me?
Without my partner in crime, I felt truly empty, as if I had lost some desperate, less ugly part of myself. If I didn’t have a future, it was nice knowing that someone else didn’t have one too. Most of all, it was really nice knowing that someone else understood. Wobin and I had been singled out for our shittiness, selected by bad genes and computer programming. What sense did it make if we had been officially declared unfit for society and then punished for not being allowed to fit in?
How much Daddy pay you to be the Best Empty at school?” my father asked me, a few days after the fight with Demeter.
As a family, we would never discuss the fight but cryptically reference the events preceding it. This would just be another Wong counterintelligence secret, to be permanently destroyed and deleted from our database of woe.
