The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  “Anything else?” the woman asked.

  I picked out some gum from the rack of candy bars.

  “Bag?”

  “Yes, please.” There was a sign on the cash register, written with a Sharpie, that said CASH ONLY. NO CHECK. NO CREDIT CARD.

  She slowly counted out my change. She was wearing very thick glasses.

  “Is Vivaldo home?” I asked. I had read in the paper that their apartment was above the store.

  She brightened. “You friends with Vivaldo?”

  “Is he home?”

  She pressed a doorbell buzzer screwed to the wall, and I could hear it ringing above us, then the thump of footsteps coming down the stairs a few seconds later.

  I was facing the back of the store, assuming he would enter from there, but the stairwell apparently led out to the street. He came in through the front door. “Yes, Mãe?” he said.

  “A friend has come to visit you!” his mother told him, as if it were a very rare occurrence.

  Hesitantly, he shook my hand, confused. “I’m sorry, could you tell me where we know each other from? I can’t place you.”

  “I’m Eric Cho,” I said. When my name didn’t register, I added, “Jessica Tsai’s friend. The 3AC.”

  He recoiled. “Let’s go outside.” We stepped out onto the sidewalk. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” I said. “Maybe calm things down a bit. Everything’s gotten a little out of control, don’t you think?”

  “You guys started it. I didn’t do a thing.”

  “I think we’ve all said a few things—without really meaning to—to stoke the fire.”

  “I’m not going to apologize,” Barboza said. “I’m standing by my principles. I’m just doing what I believe and what’s in the best interests of my constituents.”

  “Don’t you think it’d be mutually beneficial,” I asked, “if we could take a step back and, you know, discuss this rationally?”

  “I am being rational,” he said. “I ask again: What do you want?”

  “We’ll drop our complaint if you’ll drop yours.”

  He smirked. “Pressure gotten too much for you and your friends?” he said.

  “I admit, we didn’t anticipate this level of hysteria,” I said, willing to bend a little.

  “Well, you asked for it,” Barboza said. “I’m not going to drop the complaint.”

  “The show will be over in a week. You’ve already made your point.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “We listened to bad advice, okay?” I said. “We shouldn’t have brought the courts into it. We see that now. So wouldn’t it be better for the taxpayers if we both pulled back?”

  “If I dropped it, it’d look like I caved in to you.”

  “What about this, then?” I said, encouraged by the small opening. “Let’s agree to both withdraw the complaints at the end of the month, when the exhibit’s over. That way, it won’t look like anyone compromised. In the meantime, how about we impose a gag order on ourselves and not talk to the media anymore?”

  Barboza was wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt. He tugged on the knot of his tie—it was a clip-on—and removed it. He rolled the tie into a compact spool, stuffed it into his front pocket, and loosened the top button of his shirt. “You see this street?” he said. “Look how brightly lit it is, every streetlight working, the reflectors in the road in front of the crosswalks. Before I took office, this was a pedestrian hazard. Two kids got hit in one summer. One of them died. You think I’m uncultured and stupid. What makes you think you’re so much better than everyone else, just because you’re an artist? What do you contribute to society? At least I’ve made the streets safer, at least I’ve gotten foot patrols increased and put bike paths in and reduced the rodent population. Maybe these are small things to you, things that don’t matter, but they’re not to the people who live here. I’ve worked hard to make their lives a little better. What have you done?”

  The street was, in fact, impressively well lit. I could see the crease marks on his neck from his shirt collar, a mole in the notch of his jugular. “We’re trying to improve the lives of Asian Americans,” I said.

  “I’m an immigrant just like you. You think I wasn’t made fun of, being Portuguese? You think I didn’t get teased as a kid?”

  Briefly, I wondered if Barboza ever experienced saudade. What did he yearn for? I knew he had never been married, did not have children. I doubted very much he had a girlfriend. A part of me wanted to feel sorry for him.

  “Why’d you say that thing on TV?” he asked. “Why’d you have to bring race into it?”

  He thought I was Joshua. “We didn’t. You did. Remember? ‘Little egg rolls’? ‘Bonsai bush’?”

  “One of the hosts on the talk show, Louie, he fed me that line. I regret it. But I ask you, should it have been such a big deal? Now people think I’m a bigot. Yeah, it was colorful language, but that’s talk radio. You get caught up in the hyped-up energy of the show. There wasn’t any harm intended. It was just creative license.”

  The milk was getting heavy, the handles of the plastic bag cutting into my fingers. “What’s that mean, ‘creative license’?”

  “They’re just words,” he told me. “What’s it matter? Race has nothing to do with this. It’s about decency. It’s about whether government agencies should be sanctioning perversion. So to say what you did, using the race card, that was a cheap shot. I would have reacted the same way if the artist was white.”

  “Don’t you see?” I said. “It makes all the difference that the artist isn’t white. The context is what separates her exhibit from pornography.”

  “Just because you’re Asian American, you get a free pass?”

  “You don’t understand the cultural references.”

  “Explain them to me, then.”

  “The whole exhibit is about caricatures, the stereotypes that Asian Americans are saddled with.”

  “Uh-huh,” Barboza said.

  “It’s a satirical treatise on—”

  “Listen,” he said, “you guys always say how you don’t want to be treated any different.”

  “We don’t.”

  “But anything happens, you automatically say it’s racist.”

  “A lot of times, it is. You think your comment was innocent, but these things are never innocent, it’s never just a joke, they’re never just words. If you really think about it, you’ll realize what you said was racist.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Barboza said. “Tell me, who made you Martin Luther Kim?”

  A car drove by, going much too fast, the windows tinted black, hip-hop thumping from inside, the bass concussive enough so we could feel it out on the sidewalk. “Hey, hey, slow down!” Barboza yelled. He stared after the car until it had sped out of sight. “Fucking . . . ,” he began to mutter, then caught himself. He turned to me with a sheen of embarrassment.

  “I know what you were about to say,” I told him.

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “By the way, I’m not an immigrant, and it wasn’t me on TV. That was my friend Joshua. I realize we all look alike to you.”

  “We’re done here,” Barboza said.

  “Forget the offer,” I said. “We’re not going to back down. We’re not going to drop the complaint.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Go give your mother a break, Vivaldo. You shouldn’t make her work so much.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Here, dump this. It’s expired—a public safety hazard,” I said, and left the milk on the sidewalk.

  We received another anonymous letter, this one written in crayon on a page torn from a spiral notebook. “Its because of sodamight motherfuckers like you this country is going to Hell. Enoughs enough. Im coming after you. Prepare to meet the reeper and be delivered to pain. Prepare to die you crepes.”

  The misspellings, punctuation errors, and childlike handwriting aside, we were chilled by the threat,
more so because it did not include any racial epithets. Rather, the envelope contained hundreds of tiny pieces of sheet metal, methodically snipped into razor-sharp triangles.

  “I don’t know why,” Joshua said, “but it’s the green crayon that puts it over the top. It makes it feel truly deranged.”

  “Keep the front door locked,” I told him. “You’re always forgetting.”

  Glumly, Jessica nudged pieces of sheet metal across the dining table with her finger. “You said it couldn’t get any worse.”

  I gave the envelope to the police, along with the rest of the hate mail and the microcassette of hate messages from the answering machine, but they didn’t seem overly concerned. Instead, they chose to investigate the 3AC.

  I was dealing with a crisis at work. Our list broker had screwed up, and I realized we would be woefully short of addresses for our direct-mail campaign. Then I stumbled upon another snafu. The lettershop had neglected to apply for an additional mailing office in Vermont, and the process usually took thirty days. I phoned the General Mail Facility in Boston to plead for an exception, but was told that they had just canceled our bulk-mailing permit, claiming we had not used it in over fifteen months.

  In the midst of all of this, Joshua called me. “Dude,” he said, “Jimmy and Noklek are in jail.”

  The police had set up a sting operation on Pink Whistle, sending two undercover detectives to the salon the day before, both requesting massages. The first cop told Jimmy that he was in a hurry. “You want the fifteen-minute, then, for fifty,” Jimmy told him. According to the police report, the cop gave Jimmy a twenty and three tens (marked bills) and was led into the back office, which was furnished with a massage table, towels, assorted body oils, a low-lit lamp with a red shade, and mirrors framed by tassels and black lace. Noklek entered the room, wearing a tube top and hot pants, and she offered him a menu of “Extras”: Topless, Nude, Doctor, Foot Fetish, Domination, Russian Ending, and Pop the Cork, priced between $25 and $150. The detective chose Topless, and Noklek, after taking a twenty and a five from him (also marked), removed her tube top, massaged his chest and stomach, fondled his testicles, and gave him a hand job until the timer rang. Three hours later, a second detective stepped into Pink Whistle for the same services, whereupon they arrested Jimmy and Noklek. They had been held overnight and were being arraigned this morning.

  Joshua picked me up at the office and drove us to the courthouse. “Why’d they have to spend the night in jail?” I asked. “Couldn’t they get bail?”

  “I don’t know. Jimmy called me less than an hour ago.”

  “Why didn’t they let him call earlier?”

  “I don’t know, okay? I’ve been scrambling around, trying to find Margolies and Grace. I’m still fucking half asleep. I was up all night writing. I finally got on a roll, man.”

  In court, Jimmy was charged with keeping a house of ill fame, Chapter 272, Section 24, and deriving support from prostitution, Chapter 272, Section 7. The penalty for the first charge was no more than two years, but for the second charge it was no less than two years in state prison, with no chance of early release, probation, or a reduced sentence. Noklek was charged with engaging in sexual conduct for a fee, Chapter 272, Section 53A, punishable by up to one year or a fine of $500. I discovered that Chapter 272 of the Massachusetts General Laws—the same classification under which the counter-complaint against Jessica, dissemination of obscene materials, had been filed—was entitled “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order.”

  Both Jimmy and Noklek pled not guilty, and Margolies and Grace, representing them in court, arranged for their release, Jimmy on $500 cash bail, Noklek on personal recognizance, pending a hearing in one month. After the arraignment, however, Grace told us that the INS had been alerted to Noklek’s immigration status, and she might be deported before her case ever reached trial, green-card marriage or not.

  “That’s fascist crap,” Joshua said. “Cambridge is a sanctuary city. The police aren’t supposed to cooperate with the INS.”

  “She gave them a fake name. She had a fake ID,” Grace said. “That’s what set everything in motion. The line gets fuzzy if they learn someone’s illegal while in custody. Even then, they normally wouldn’t bother doing anything, especially for a minor offense. But this isn’t normal. Not with so much about you guys in the press. You know, you could have given the rest of us a little warning you were going to file the complaint against Barboza. Or maybe even have let us weigh in on it. But what did I really expect from you three prima donnas?”

  Joshua and I waited for Noklek and Jimmy to be released from holding. “This is total bullshit,” Joshua said. “Since when is it acceptable for cops to get their pugs yanked, not once but twice, on the city’s dime for an investigation? This is all retaliatory, you know. It’s because we’re Asian.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said. “You did this, Joshua. This is all your fault. The massages were your idea. You knew how this would turn out. It was entirely predictable. The whole green-card scam, did you and Jimmy cook it up to get Noklek to prostitute herself?”

  “No, man. That was sincere.”

  I thought of all the trouble he had caused over the years, all the preening and disquisitions and rebukes, all the bad decisions that he had suckered me into, all those moments of anxiety and queasy discomfort I had had to endure as he harassed and manipulated and bullied me into servitude. How much better, I wondered, would my life have been if I’d never met Joshua?

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “Nothing you do is sincere. It was just a whim. You were never serious about it. You get these impulses and you go on these crusades, but you never stop to think how people will be affected. You keep fucking up everyone’s lives, Joshua. You realize that? I think you do, but you keep doing it anyway. Why is that? Is it entertaining to you? Amusing? Are you getting writing material out of it? Let me tell you something. The world doesn’t owe you anything because you’re Asian, because you were abandoned. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take this shit. I’m done. I’m done with you.”

  Noklek came out first, hugging her arms around her chest. She was still wearing her tube top and hot pants and a pair of strappy shoes with ludicrously high stilettos. I touched her on the shoulder, and she yelled, “Yaa ma jap chan!” and ran away from us, clacking down the hall.

  “I need a drink,” Jimmy said when he emerged. “Is it too early for a drink?”

  I took the T from Kendall to Harvard Square and then rode the bus to the Palaver office. I spent the rest of the day calling the General Mail Facility about our permit and searching for documentation in our files to prove that we had, in fact, sent out three mailings in the past year. After hours of faxing and being put on hold, I was able to get the permit reinstated.

  Drained, I went home early, splurging on a cab. I walked into the kitchen, and through the sliding glass door I saw Jessica in her white silk robe, kneeling on the deck outside.

  But it wasn’t Jessica. It was Noklek in Jessica’s robe, and she was soaking wet, from water, I assumed, reenacting the Songkran festival rituals. She had the shrine before her, the three small Buddhas, the flowers, candles, incense, and framed photographs of her mother, father, and sister. Rice grains were scattered on the redwood boards of the deck, and white string was wrapped around her ankles. Somehow she had tied her wrists together with the string, too, and between her palms she held two flowers, two lit candles, and a twenty-dollar bill.

  I stood at the glass door, looking down at her, and, sensing my presence, she slowly turned to me. Instead of white chalk, it looked as if candle wax was smeared over her lips and eyelids. She stared at me, emotionless, for a moment, then faced the shrine again, the photos of her family.

  I noticed the red plastic can beside her, the depressions of an X on its side, and I realized then that it was the spare canister for the lawn mower. She had drenched herself in gasoline, not water. That was when she closed her eyes, tipped the candles agai
nst the left breast of the robe, and set herself aflame.

  17

  At what point is it acceptable to give up? The years go by, and there might be some validations, a few encouraging signs, a small triumph here and there, but more often than not, failure follows upon failure. You get into your thirties, and every day you wonder if it’s worth it to keep going. How long can you continue being a starving artist? Will it ever happen for you? Very possibly, it will not. Then where will you be? Sometime or another, you have to decide.

  The oblique questions and snipes from civilians and your family become a babel in your head, insisting that you grow up, be practical, find a real job, give up on this fruitless dream, because, really, it’s become kind of pathetic. You tried, but it came to naught. It might have been due to a lack of providence, yet more likely, although no one will ever say so outright, it was probably due to a lack of talent. Even among ourselves, there are doubts and judgments. We still go to one another’s shows and exhibitions and readings and performances, rare as they may be now, and afterward we dole out all the appropriate accolades, but secretly we wonder if, perhaps, our friends never quite lived up to their promise—if we believed they had promise to begin with—and if, perhaps, it’s time for them to give up.

  We love our friends. We hate them, too. It’s easy to feign support and sympathy for them when they’re failing. It’s much harder to affect elation when they start to succeed. It’s a terrible feeling—a sterling reminder of your underachievement and inertia. This is when the schadenfreude begins, the invidious whispers that maybe your friend’s success is undeserved, when you revel in the publication of an unkind review or the unexpected exclusion of your friend’s work from that year’s major awards. You detest this about yourself. You’ve become exactly the type of person you’ve always despised. It eats away at you. You promise to reform, to be more generous, to focus on your own work with renewed vigor and diligence. Yet it seems that there’s never enough time, or that when you finally do find the time and embark on a new project, you falter right away, feeling dispirited and desperate, knowing that it’s all wrong, that it’d be pointless to continue because the whole thing is misconceived, and even if it isn’t, you know you could never pull it off, anyway.