by Jess Row
What the fuck are you doing?
Sunbathing, Alan says. Vitamin D.
You’ll turn into a crispy Chicken McNugget. It’s about 105 out here, Loco Blanco.
That’s Blanco Loco, Martin says.
From the back, from an angle I never see, two slabs of human tissue, two specimens: one white as Crisco, white as Sherwin-Williams Bright White, white so that he reflects the sun, an oblong moon; one turned dark, coal-dark, much darker than his usual medium-toned, maple-syrup color. I stand there for a moment, fascinated. It’s not usually this stark. Pink, brown, and yellow, Martin says. We’re the twenty-first-century Neapolitan trio.
You know something? Alan’s voice is muffled by the concrete. This is it. I could live like this.
And if the sun were a little hotter, we could just turn right back into pure carbon.
Shut up. I mean it. Freeze time. So I can just lie here in the sun, smelling that pizza Wang brought back, watching Katie Cryer over there practice her synchronized swimming or whatever it is.
It’s so unlike him, a positive statement of any kind, let alone a declaration of happiness, that Martin lifts his head and turns it to the other side, so that he faces the back of Alan’s head. And I think, this isn’t my story. This is a dream I’m going to wake up from and never remember.
Write a song about it, why don’t you?
Maybe I will.
—
—Hell, it was a cheap Saturday Night Special she bought in Woonsocket when she was going to Brown. Trust me on that. I can tell you the store; I’ve been there myself. Only place to get a retail handgun between New Haven and Boston. Maybe she thought it was cool, like Charlie’s Angels. How are you supposed to predict these things? She’s in Bangkok for eight months, a week for the surgery, six weeks in recovery, and then the rest of the time working in the goddamned kitchen or on the computer. I think we got her out of the house three times. Didn’t want to sightsee. Didn’t want the goddamned pad kee mao.
—
Daddy, Meimei says, when I lift her out of bed, Daddydaddydaddydaddy. Stringing together the words with great satisfaction. Her legs wrap halfway around my waist, little pincers, little monkey limbs. She went to bed in one of Wendy’s old T-shirts and a pull-up diaper, now heavy with urine, pressed against my stomach. Do we have to get up already? It’s still dark.
It’s December, I tell her, flipping on her closet light, her little body still cemented to me, pulling a plum sweater-dress off its hanger. Let’s let Mama sleep, okay? Don’t talk too loud. Her heels thump on the carpet.
Can you make me oatmeal?
Yeah.
After you make yourself coffee.
Priorities, little girl, I say, switching to English. Priorities.
With bananas and raisins?
I think we’re out of raisins.
Then you should get more, silly.
I have to go by the store on the way home this afternoon. Will you remind me?
Can I draw a note on your hand?
No. No more drawing on people’s hands. Miss Lewis warned you about that, right?
Her face, as it cranes up to look at me in pretend puzzlement—is it the murky light from her tiny tableside Dora lamp, or has she gotten darker? Has the brown in her eyes crushed the blue?
Stay, Daddy, she says. Stay with us. Stay here. In this story.
I can’t. I have to go to work.
—
—Yeah, she walked into the office and just popped him. Just like that.
We’re working on tracing his lists of suppliers. At this point the maintenance drugs are the crucial thing. Problem is, he kept way too much of it in his head. And as far as a replacement surgeon goes, we’re absolutely screwed. I mean absolutely. This was an irreplaceable asset. He would have been training ten assistants after the announcement, after we were out in the open. But not now. Too dangerous. Yeah, you know, our coverage with the Chens gets us up to five million. But believe me, Sasha, this isn’t a money thing. You have to know people at these pharmacies. All this stuff is hand-prepared.
What did you think? That I had a private stash somewhere? Maybe I should have. Jesus Christ, it all went through him, okay? Tariko’s just out of his mind over it. It was his job, primarily. Watching her, I mean. Monitoring her movements. But she didn’t make any movements. She just sat there and stewed.
Our guy’s on it. Obviously. The important thing is to watch for noises in the press. What’s done is done. I’m not after any vendettas. I’ve made that clear. She’s untouchable as long as she stays in Korea, and I doubt she’s going anywhere else. No, there’s been nothing in the papers. Mai is helping out with that. We told the police he was alone in the office and the cameras were out for maintenance. Disgruntled former client. Apparently it’s a thing in Bangkok. They didn’t seem too interested. His family took the body. No idea where the funeral was.
Whatever you say. The important thing is, Sasha, we need chemists. An in-house staff. I couldn’t give a damn where they’re located. Put them in Vilnius, put them in São Paulo. Put them in Juárez. We have all his papers, but what good does that do us? Ten synthetic chemists, say, on a yearly contract. Get them straight out of grad school, get them from Sandoz and Merck and Pfizer, get them from meth labs, I don’t care. As long as they can do the work. We’re talking about a total reboot here. The drugs come first. Self-tanning. Yeah, okay, I said it, right? Silpa’s not even cold. So shoot me. Let’s talk primary markets. Then we develop the surgeons. Five years down the line, Orchid reopens. In the meantime, we’re Orchis Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. I just did the paperwork. Caymans.
No, my same office. Same address. Orchid Imports, 200 Light Street, Sixteenth floor, Baltimore, Maryland 21001. I’ll be back there in a week. Have to take care of some business first. Tariko’s wrapping things up, no. Sold the house to a Saudi. Six-fifty, that’s fifteen percent profit. Silver linings, right?
• • •
I wake up again, now, a haze of light filling the gauze bandages over my eyes. A white world, inside a fluorescent tube. The airplane window vibrates against my cheek. Sunlight above the clouds, the brightest sunlight, unfiltered, un-ozoned, cell-killing, cell-dividing. It’ll hurt to open them at first, Silpa said, under the bandages, but you shouldn’t hesitate. Move those babies around. You don’t want the eye muscles to atrophy. Anyway, by that time you’ll only be a day or so away from full use.
You there? Martin asks. You there, Kelly?
Curtis, I say, through a dry mouth. It’s Curtis.
Shit. Sorry. Curtis. Now I can stop taking your pulse. I was sure those Vicodins were really something stronger. Never seen anyone sleep so long.
I wasn’t asleep the whole time.
I hear him taking a moment to digest this.
The important thing, he says, is that we’ve got your back. Nothing changes. Payments as normal. Deliveries as normal. Here we are, landing in Shanghai in forty-five minutes. As promised. Passport in hand.
It didn’t sound that way to me.
Forget what you heard. You were addled. I could have been talking Klingon.
Silpa’s dead, I say. Isn’t he? Did I get that much right?
The alert bell pings overhead, and a voice comes over the loudspeaker. Dajia hao, the flight attendant says. She has a chirpy Shandong accent. A warm tear rests on my upper lip. How good it is, I’m thinking, to hear a language I completely understand.
Here. Martin presses a cold glass into my hand. Don’t worry, he says. Ginger ale. I’m not trying to knock you back out.
So I guess your plans are off the table.
For now, he says. For now. The moment has to be right. Think globally, act locally. You have to expand your consciousness. The world is Baltimore, remember? It just doesn’t know it yet. His face slackens; he might be, impossibly, about to cry. I’m always at home, he says. Yo
u know why? My money travels with me. There’s nothing more beautiful than stepping up to that ATM for the first time, wherever you are, putting your card in and watching the color of the bills shooting out. It’s like sex. That’s when I think, there’s nothing I can’t do.
Not me, I say. That’s never worked on me.
Tell me about it.
No, I mean, in my universe, Baltimore is a fixed point. It doesn’t expand and contract.
You’ll see how that changes when you come back to visit.
What do you mean, come back? I’ve never been there before.
Heh-heh-heh, he says. Don’t fuck with me. Trying to give yourself retrograde amnesia? It’s not that easy. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Seriously, I say. I’m from Athens, Georgia. Didn’t you know that? Never been to Baltimore in my life. I mean, I passed through on 95 on the way up to Cambridge.
As I say it, I will it into being: an orb, a warm, pulsing thing, orange-yellow, the color of butterscotch candy, rising again out of my very center, up into my throat. My guide-light. It points only in one direction. The future vibrates in me; my legs are shaking. I want to tear off the bandages right now.
Do I feel sadness? I ought to ask myself that, but it seems like an impossible question. Should I grieve for them, for my lost girl, for the woman who could finish my sentences in two languages? And spend my life, waste my life, along with theirs? I’ve become them. I didn’t make the world. Should I give up on it?
My senses have grown sharper, I’m thinking: I can hear a magazine rustling in the seat behind us, keys clicking on a laptop, a can of Diet Coke snapping open. The rustle of life itself. The impatience of it. All these people fidgeting with their phones, drumming their fingers, feeling money trickling away with every waiting second. The towers of Shanghai, towers I won’t even recognize, floating up out of an electric haze. The light thrown off by assets multiplying. Isn’t this the pattern of heaven? I’ve grown old, I’m thinking. Old and slack, in my original habitat, in the cage of one body, hardly even aware that it is a cage. Time to wake up. Time to plant some seed capital. Who cares if it’s with Orchid, or with Hue, or Hue.2, or something I haven’t dreamed up yet? Money, I’m thinking, to paraphrase The Art of War, always finds its place. And when I have enough, whatever enough means, I’ll endow another wing of the Harvard Library. The Wang Center for Translation Studies. Or maybe the Miao Center for Translation Studies. Or, if the time is right, the Thorndike Center. The Wendy and Meimei Thorndike Center.
Because that story, too, will have to be told.
Don’t fuck with me, Martin says. I’m not your goddamned life coach. For the first time I can hear the ticking of fear in his voice. This isn’t about your journey, he says, so let’s get some things on the record. You signed a contract. You have duties to perform. A fiduciary obligation. And don’t think that you can hit the ground and go all renegade on us. We’ll find Julie-nah, and we’ll find you.
Okay, I say, just to keep him calm. You’re right.
We’ll be in touch when it’s all arranged, he says. In the meantime, you have a Bank of China account set up for you. Here’s the card. Here’s the passport. I’ll whisper the PIN in your ear. You ready? He leans over until I can feel the warmth of his lips glowing on my ear. 2526. There’s an easier way to remember it, though.
Because it spells Alan? I say. Who’s Alan? Am I supposed to remember him?
The plane is descending now; I feel it in my knees, my hips, the pull of the atmosphere, the engines measuring out the shock of gravity in little tugs and dips. Martin says nothing. I remember, just now, something he said to me on the flight out of BWI, when we’d just settled into our seats. I love taking off, he said, but I hate to land. Gives me the creeps. Can’t get it over with soon enough. Those flaps, you know, that flip up on the wings? Doesn’t it just seem like a toy, when you look at those things? Like fingernails. All that momentum, and then they flick a switch and squash you like an ant.
You going to be okay getting out of the airport? he asks suddenly. Because I’m not staying overnight. My flight’s in two hours.
Back to Bangkok?
Almaty. Kazakhstan.
What’s in Kazakhstan?
I don’t know. Fur hats? Lamb skewers? Mostly an oil pipeline, that’s what I hear. Oil going to China. No, seriously. Potential clients. And investors. It’s been in the works for months. No point canceling when we could be on the cusp of something new.
The alert bell pings again. We’re on the ground, we’ve taxied, without noticing it, and bumped up against the boarding gate. We stand up together, or rather he lifts me up, by the elbow. Careful, he says, watch your head. Here. He binds my hands around the handle of my laptop bag.
Martin, I say, suddenly overcome. You thought of everything.
Don’t worry about it. What else was I supposed to do? Go on, I’ll be right behind you.
These are my last few minutes, I’m thinking, or, more precisely, the thought wandering through my mind, looking for a feeling to settle on. Goodbye, Kelly. I ought to hug myself. Instead, I reach up and lock him in an awkward, grappling, swaying embrace. And then I turn and find the back of the next seat, pulling myself into the aisle. In front of me, it seems, to the left, at the exit door, is an intense brightness, and there’s a cloud of some floral perfume, as if someone’s dropped a duty-free bag. It doesn’t matter. I hear the babble of voices, dialects, accents, the toddler saying lift me up! lift me up! The wife calling, old man, don’t forget the camera, it’s right by your foot.
Excuse me, the flight attendant is saying, in Chinese, of course, coming down the aisle toward me, excuse me, we have a disabled passenger here. To me she says, loudly, taking my elbow, sir, follow me, I’ll take you through.
Is this happening? Can this be? My words. My world. I’ve been addressed; I’ve been seen. The knot of fear at the back of my neck—how long has it been there, I’m wondering, has it been there my entire waking life?—dissolves.
You’re going to make it, right? Martin asks a moment later.
I turn against the tide of shoulders and elbows. Biezhaoji, I almost say, turning the words on my tongue. I mean, don’t worry about me.
You’re here now, right? You’re home.
I’m home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Sander Gilman, for Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul; Jonathan Ames, for Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs; Rebecca Walker, for Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness; Fred Moten, for In the Break: The Poetics of the Black Avant-Garde; Spike Lee, for Do the Right Thing; David Simon and all those involved in creating The Wire; Maxine Hong Kingston, for The Woman Warrior (and particularly “Thirteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”); Paul Beatty for The White Boy Shuffle; Adam Mansbach for Angry Black White Boy; Cornel West for The Gifts of Black Folk in the Age of Terrorism, and above all to James Baldwin for Another Country and for his words to white Americans, in anger and love.
To the doctors, scientists, lawyers, and their staffs who generously answered my questions: Alan Engler, M.D., Ryan Turner, M.D., Steven Cohen, M.D., Pichet Rodchareon, M.D., Chettawut Tulyapanich, M.D., Professor Victor Hruby of the University of Arizona, Professor David Gray of the University of Maryland School of Law, Professor Byron Warnken of the University of Baltimore School of Law, and David Waranch, Esq. Also to Ruangsasithorn Sangwarosakul, Matt Wheeler, and Justin McDaniel for their help making connections in Bangkok. And to Bobby Sullivan for clarifying a point of Rasta etiquette.
To Major Jackson, Martha Southgate, and Sonya Posmentier, who read early drafts and shared immensely helpful thoughts.
To Rosalia Ruiz, Laura Hill, and the teachers of U-NOW Day Nursery, Little Missionary Day Nursery, and PS 3.
To my friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the City University of Hong Kong, for their encourage
ment, and in particular to David Blake for helping me secure a sabbatical when I needed it most.
To Denise Shannon, who believed in this project before I did, and Megan Lynch, who saw it through to the end.
To my parents, for their unwavering support.
To Sonya, Mina, and Asa for sharing the life that inspired this book most of all.
