The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  We were in the living room, and Joshua was going through his mail. “You really quit drinking for her?” he asked. “Why deny yourself one of the few pleasures in life?”

  “Actually, it’s been good, not drinking,” I said. “It was harder for me to stop than I thought. I had cravings the first few days for a beer. But then that passed, and I started sleeping better. I feel this new kind of energy and clarity now.”

  “Yeah? Maybe I’ll try it myself.”

  “You?” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Self-restraint has never been your forte.”

  “I could stop anything cold turkey if I wanted. My discipline is nonpareil.”

  “Is that why you’ve been screwing around with Lily instead of sitting in front of your computer?”

  Joshua set down his letter opener and exhaled laboriously. “I don’t know what happened. I was in such a great flow with the novel—I thought for sure I’d finish a draft by the end of the year—and then all of a sudden everything just fizzled. I’m sort of panicked, to tell you the truth. What if it never comes back?”

  “Why don’t you show it to me?” I asked.

  “Not ready for external perusal yet.”

  “How many pages do you have?”

  “Hundreds. But it’s a mess.”

  “Just keep at it,” I told him.

  “Easy for you to say. If I’m not able to write, the world is intolerable to me. Utterly without purpose. Lily’s tiresome, but at least she’s serving as a form of provisional entertainment. I’ll be ditching her soon enough, no question, but I’m going to wait until after the BVIs.”

  “That’s the only reason you’ve gone beyond your usual three weeks?”

  “That, and the room service, and the fact that she drains old blind Bob with the efficacy of an industrial Hoover every night,” Joshua said. “I think the BVIs, the change of scenery, would do me good. And it’d be research. My characters live on an island, some of them are fishermen, but I don’t really know anything about living on an island, about boats or the sea. I think I could justify writing the whole trip off on my taxes.”

  “I’d love to see how that flies with an auditor.”

  “What are the AA meetings like?” Joshua asked.

  I had only been to two thus far—one at Trinity Church, another at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Mirielle liked to rotate locations. “They’re less somber, funnier, than I expected. Still, some of the stories are brutal.”

  “Can I tag along sometime?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  “I’m curious,” Joshua said. “Maybe I’ll get something out of it for my novel, hearing these people talk.”

  I was skeptical. I didn’t want to bring Joshua to a meeting, afraid he might deride the proceedings, which was the last thing Mirielle needed. For several days, things had been very tenuous for her, Mirielle thrown by the smallest hiccups, such as not being able to find her birth certificate, which she needed to replace her passport. Her parents were unobliging. “How do they not know where my birth certificate is?” Mirielle had said. “They didn’t think it was worth keeping?” I made phone calls for her, found out the Vital Records Division in D.C. would mail a copy of her birth certificate to her if she sent verification of her identity with a driver’s license, which of course had been stolen. I drove Mirielle to the RMV in Watertown and waited in line with her for two hours. She stayed sober.

  She thought it might be fruitful for Joshua to go to a meeting. “This might be his way of acknowledging he has a problem,” she said.

  So on Saturday, Joshua accompanied us to the Church of the Advent on Brimmer Street. The meeting was being held in the basement of the Beacon Hill church, attended mostly by gay men, who, Mirielle assured us, would keep the mood light, in spite of any horrors they might relate. This was an open meeting: families and friends of AA members could come as guests, and we wouldn’t be expected to speak or state that we were alcoholics, Tim, the chairperson that night, told us when we entered the basement.

  The room was crowded, around fifty people or so. With cups of coffee and cookies, we sat down on the beige metal folding chairs, and Tim began the meeting by asking, “Would all of you who care to please join me in opening with a moment of silence for those who are still sick and suffering?” Then he led us into the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

  We said amen, and then there were introductions, and then Tim announced the topic for discussion that night—Self-Acceptance—and several members went to the podium to speak, sharing their drunkalogues, the stories familiar yet affecting. An ex–Navy SEAL used to sneak into bathhouses and public restrooms, blind drunk, and have anonymous sex with men and then beat them up, all the while in the closet in the military. A doctor started drinking and taking Benzedrine in med school, which progressed to injecting Demerol and Pentothal and losing his medical license, his wife, his kids, and his house. A man whose partner had died of AIDS found himself going to bars and picking up men and having unprotected sex with them and becoming HIV-positive himself.

  The meeting was wrapping up. They handed out baskets for the Seventh Tradition, asking for contributions, and Tim was about to close with the Lord’s Prayer when Joshua, who had been silent and respectful all evening, raised his hand without warning. “Could I come up and speak?” he asked.

  Tim squinted at him, disconcerted. “Well, this is a little unorthodox, but I suppose it’d be all right.”

  Joshua rose out of his chair, and I grabbed his arm. “Don’t do this,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, this will be great,” he said, and walked to the head of the room.

  “What’s he up to?” Mirielle whispered.

  “Nothing good, I’m sure,” I told her.

  At the podium, he said, “My name is Joshua.”

  “Hi, Joshua,” everyone said.

  “I’ve been listening very carefully to the testimonials this evening—they’ve been truly inspiring and courageous. But I have to admit discomfort standing here, in the basement of a Christian church. I’m Jewish, you see. Call me cynical, but I have difficulty putting much stock in Christianity, when the entirety of the religion was built upon believing an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl’s explanation for how she got pregnant.”

  The audience crowed.

  “I was born on Cheju Island, off the southwestern tip of the Korean Peninsula. I was abandoned when I was four days old and sent to an orphanage on the mainland, in the port city of Pusan. I know nothing about my parents. It could be that my mother was an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl who couldn’t manufacture a clever explanation for how she got pregnant. When I was five, one of the teachers at the orphanage molested me. I told the administrators, but no one would believe me. They took me into the courtyard, where they’d assembled all the kids, and made me proclaim that I had been lying and then shaved off all the hair from my head.

  “I ran away the next year. I stowed away on a cargo container ship and ended up in Hawaii, where I begged on the streets and worked the sugar plantation fields. An old Chinese hooker got me drunk one night and absolved me of my virginity when I was seven. Thereafter, sex and alcohol were forever enjoined for me. After a few years, I got into a bit of trouble with the law and had to decamp. I hitched a ride on a tanker to San Francisco and picked Brussels sprouts and artichokes in a small town called Rosarita Bay.”

  “Goddamn him,” I muttered. “Goddamn him.”

  “A family of Mexican migrant workers took me in, sort of as their mascot, and I followed them down the San Joaquin Valley and through Arizona to Brownsville, Texas. Oddly, in the Lone Star State, I found myself discriminated against more than the wetbacks.”

  He recounted the Southie pier story, only he changed his age to ten and the setting to Port Isabel, on the edge of Laguna Madre. In the church basement, when he got to the climax about t
he duct tape, there were gasps and soughs of sympathy.

  “I became a syrup head. I’d steal prescription cough medicine and mix it with Sprite and drink it by the gallon. Texas tea, it was called. I was also a compulsive masturbator. I’d create these ornate fantasies with which to beat off, using a variety of props: gym socks, milk bottles, and, once, a big piece of liver that was sitting in the refrigerator. I got addicted to porn. I literally wanted to fuck anything that walked.”

  “Um, the profanity?” Tim cautioned from the front row.

  “Sorry. I’d have sex with anything ambulatory, including—I regret to say—three times with the family dog, a rat terrier named Pepe. I started snorting coke and smack, and I became a street hustler—men, women, whatever. I’d do anything for money. I had this beautiful blond girlfriend in junior high school, Leigh Anne Wiatt.”

  “Just first names, please,” Tim said.

  “Leigh Anne, Leigh Anne—a tasty little majorette with a bad-girl streak. I took her across the border and got her doped up and sold her to some cholos for a donkey show. She couldn’t pee straight for a year.”

  Now there were guttural protests, not laughter. Some men looked at each other, bewildered, angry. Beside me, Mirielle was furious. Joshua had gone too far. He was enjoying himself too much. People were beginning to catch on that he was playing an elaborate hoax on them, constructing a grand tour of misfortune and debauchery. He was ad-libbing, slapping his narrative together by tapping into a few raunchy movies and dysfunctional memoirs of the day, as well as Portnoy’s Complaint, sparing no one (Mirielle, me, my parents, Kathryn Newey), and, worst of all, lampooning the earnest speeches that had been shared earlier that night. He was making a mockery of the entire program. Once the rest of the crowd figured it out, there’d be mayhem. They would lynch him. And I would let them. It was unpardonable, what he was doing.

  “The Mexican family eventually kicked me out. I made my way to Detroit to join the hip-hop scene there, and I got jumped by two laid-off autoworkers with baseball bats. I was in a coma for three weeks. I still get seizures, can’t hear out of my left ear. By the time I got out of the hospital, I was hooked on painkillers: roxis, percs, Captain Codys, vikes, Miss Emmas, I’d take whatever I could get my hands on, and do whatever I had to in order to get zombed. I kited checks. I robbed johns. I jacked cars. I scammed a bunch of Hmongs with a pyramid scheme.

  “I got sent to juvie, where for a while I was a regular dick cushion. What saved me was a counselor, a girl from Massachusetts just out of college. Her name was Didi. She said while I was incarcerated, I might as well make use of my time and get an education. She figured out I was dyslexic and tutored me. I started keeping a journal and writing letters—long, intimate letters—to imaginary relatives. I’d actually mail them, picking out addresses at random from an atlas: Uncle Dae-hyung in Kittery, Maine, Grandma Soo-bong in Weeki Wachee, Florida.

  “Didi and I fell in love. She was a sweet, modest girl who’d never done anything wrong, born and raised in Lowell, where her family owned a bakery store renowned for its sourdough bread. I moved with her to Lawrence, got my GED and a job at the New Balance factory, and went straight. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But her family, this large Irish clan, wouldn’t accept me—they said they never would, not this degenerate ex-junkie gook—and eventually Didi couldn’t take the pressure anymore and left me.

  “I started drinking and pharming again. I felt so alone. I wanted to die so many times. Just shut everything down. Why—” Joshua’s voice cracked, and he closed his eyes. “Why did everyone I ever care about leave me?”

  He clutched the edges of the podium, stared down at the microphone, and didn’t speak again for more than a minute. The crowd, which had become increasingly agitated and hostile, quieted. They all knew by now that his entire monologue had been a fabrication, but they could sense, as I did, a subtle change—that inadvertently Joshua had stumbled upon a cavity of undisguised emotion.

  “I don’t know who I am,” he said finally. “I don’t know my real name, my real birthday. Other people, they have photos of themselves as babies, family albums. I have nothing. There’s no record of my existence. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. I’m worthless.”

  He stopped again. “I don’t know what to do. What will I do? No matter what I do, I can’t get anyone to love me. I’ve had my chances, but I always fuck it up. It never fails. Why do I keep doing that? It mystifies me. My parents, though, they knew. They could tell when I was born, they could tell I was a lost cause. They saw the truth right away. The truth is, I’m unlovable. That’s why they abandoned me.”

  He began to cry. He stayed up there, helpless, and a number of people in the audience, including Mirielle, cried with him.

  “I’m sorry. I’m awfully sorry,” he managed to say, and walked back to his seat. The audience applauded. People patted Joshua on the back as he sidestepped to the chair next to me. Tim asked us to stand and hold hands, and we bowed our heads and recited the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” I squeezed Joshua’s hand as he continued to whimper.

  When the prayer was finished, everyone shouted the standard coda to AA meetings—“Keep coming back! It works!”—and clapped.

  Mirielle hugged Joshua. Others did, too, and shook his hand benevolently. “You’ll always have a home with us,” they said. “You’ll always have a family here.”

  Outside, while we waited for Mirielle, Joshua lit a cigarette and shivered in the cold. “Man, that was fucking nerve-wracking, making that story up on the spot like that,” he said. “I was, like, Okay, push it, push it, keep going, let’s create a Dickensian epic here, then I’d feel I was losing them and I’d have to tell myself, Come on, think of something, you weenie, reel them back in. I couldn’t figure out a way to explain how I got to be Jewish.”

  “Joshua—”

  “Story time for the wretched and woebegone. Not bad, huh?”

  “I want to tell you,” I said, “I was really . . . moved by that.”

  “ ‘Moved’?” He cackled. “Come on, you didn’t buy a word of that shit, did you?”

  “The last part . . .”

  “The last part was no different than the rest. I needed an arc—an ending of contrition, of implied redemption—to round the fucker out. The whole thing was a crock.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Don’t okay me like you know something,” he told me. “Believe me, there wasn’t a shred of sincerity to anything I said up there.”

  12

  Everything changed the following week. Paviromo accepted an excerpt from Joshua’s novel-in-progress for the special Fiction Discoveries issue of Palaver, which he was now planning to publish in June. Then he shocked me by finally, after three years of toying intimations and broken pledges, taking my story “The Unrequited” for the issue as well. I didn’t know what to make of the offer at first. I was, in fact, initially torn about it.

  “Did you have something to do with this?” I asked Joshua.

  “I might have impressed upon him the obvious grandeur of your story, which he’s been a blinkered arse and bloody ninny to overlook all this time.”

  “I can’t have a story in a magazine where I’m the managing editor,” I said. “Everyone will say the only reason I got in was nepotism. No one would count it as a real publication.”

  “Look, you and I both know the story stands up, that it’s had to undergo quadruple the scrutiny of anything that’s ever come over the transom at Palaver. Am I right?”

  “It didn’t pass the scrutiny of all those other journals I sent it to.”

  “Mandarins and halfwits, those editors.”

  “Maybe I should withdraw it,” I said.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? So what if a few curmudgeons chirp about it? Fuck ’em! You deserve this, man. More than anyone else, you deserve this. I’ll never forgive you if you withdraw it. It’d be such a fucking loony act of career self-sabotage to pull it right when
you’re on the cusp. I’m telling you, once people actually read the goddamn story, there’ll be no question that you belong.”

  I deliberated for a few days, and even though I still had reservations, I signed the publication contract (which I had had to draw up myself), and let Joshua take Jessica and me out for a congratulatory dinner at Rialto in the Charles Hotel—a threefold celebration, since Jessica had received some good news herself. Her application to the Cambridge Arts Council for an exhibition had been approved.

  “This is going to be our year, man,” Joshua said. “1999 will be when everything comes together for us.”

  I believed everything just might. I began dreaming. Dreaming that our stories would be selected for prize anthologies, and agents and editors would come clamoring. That we’d get book contracts and fulfill our vow to each publish a book before we turned thirty. That Jessica’s exhibition would be a smash and lead to her signing with a dealer in Boston and another in New York. That Vanity Fair would ask to do a two-page photo spread of the 3AC, but only of the three of us, Joshua, Jessica, and me, because we were the founders, the core, the real fin de siècle noisemakers who were heralding the arrival of Asian American artists in the new millennium, the ones who had everything before them, a future that promised to be bright and glamorous and extraordinary.

  I began writing again—not just revising old stuff but embarking on something brand-new, a novella to round out the collection, about a third-generation Korean American from Mission Viejo who moves to Boston to work for a management consulting firm and encounters the bamboo ceiling. I even yielded to Jessica and several 3AC members’ supplications to form a writers’ group after the holidays.

  For the next week and a half, I wrote every minute I wasn’t at Palaver or with Mirielle. She was getting stronger—and more affectionate toward me—with each day. “I feel good around you,” she said.

  By the time we boarded the plane to Tortola, my spirits were at their highest since college, and Mirielle was giddy as well, excited about the trip. “How long till we’re there?” she kept asking me during the flight. “Can I wear your watch?” I handed her my black digital chronometer. A flight attendant, serving drinks, said to Mirielle, “And what would your husband like?,” and throughout the rest of the journey, Mirielle referred to me as her “husband,” and I referred to her as my “wife,” and with each reference, we chortled.