Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  She had imagined a scaffolding of lights, a sea of cables strewn across the floor. But inside there was no sign of a film shoot anywhere, no additional crew. Instead, there was just a middle-aged Chinese man sitting at the kitchen table working his way through a pile of scratch tickets. He looked up at Anna, then said something to the woman in Chinese, who immediately barked something back. They sound angry, Anna couldn’t help but think.

  “Sit!” the old woman said to Anna. “Sit! Sit!” She pushed Anna toward the couch, which was upholstered in a cheap and scratchy but immaculately clean floral print, and disappeared into the bedroom. From her place on the couch, Anna could see a little Buddha in the corner where a shrine had been set up. Some wan slices of orange, two apples, a dying bouquet of carnations, Chex Mix in a shiny bowl. That’s what being an all-knowing deity gets you, Anna thought. The apartment smelled like boiled chicken; Anna decided to breathe through her mouth.

  The woman emerged from the bathroom waving a billowing red pajama top.

  “Oh. That’s really sweet of you,” Anna demurred, trying not to sound nasal. “That’s OK.”

  “Nokay!” the woman barked. “It fit you.” She unfurled the top like a parachute.

  “I can just wear this jacket. See?”

  “You stain!” The woman dropped the shirt in her lap, jabbing Anna’s chest with one finger. “Dirty.” And at this, the man looked up and let loose a long stream of accusatory Chinese at the woman, who retreated to the bedroom again.

  “Sorry about Mama,” the man said in perfect English. “She’s been very excited with the crew here all day.”

  “That’s OK,” said Anna.

  “She stayed up late cooking and now everyone’s a vegetarian.” He shook his head. “Chinese hospitality.”

  Before Anna could respond, the door opened again.

  “Sam, sorry, man, all they had at the bodega was Sweet Million, Take Five, and Quick Draw,” Taj said. He walked into the kitchen, followed by Lauren.

  “No good.”

  “Sorry. It’s all they had.”

  “I told you Mega Millions. The only other one I play is New York Power Ball. Except Sundays. Sunday is Power Play.” Sam took a stack of lotto cards from Taj and inspected them, dubious. “I don’t even know how these work.”

  “I think you scratch them,” Taj deadpanned.

  “Scratch them however you want,” Lauren added. “Pretend like they’re Mega Millions.”

  “We’ll get you some Millions tomorrow,” Taj said. “Where’s Mrs. Leung? Mrs. Leung!” Taj walked back to the door and poked his head into the hallway. “Sasha?”

  Mrs. Leung announced herself with the sad scuffing of slippers. “We take again?” she said. She scuffed over to the counter without waiting for an answer. “Take, take,” Mrs. Leung muttered to herself. She pulled a potato from the colander in the sink and started peeling.

  “Sasha!” Taj yelled again as Lauren grabbed a boom mic from behind the coatrack. Taj handed her his heavy-looking headphones and she plugged them into the recorder unit clipped to her belt.

  Happy for some excuse to occupy herself, Anna slipped away to the bathroom to change shirts. When she returned, Sasha was standing in the doorway holding a paper plate of minimuffins.

  “Is raining outside,” Sasha intoned.

  “You’ve got the camera?” said Taj.

  “Yep.” Sasha took his place by the table next to Sam, pulling a camera from the depths of his cargo vest. It was tiny, a tourist cam that easily fit in one palm—a Kodak Zi8, Anna realized.

  “Anna, keep your eye on Sasha if you want to learn some moves. He’s the man,” said Taj. Then, turning to Sasha, “Ready?” Sasha nodded. “Sam? Mrs. Leung?”

  “Take, take,” Mrs. Leung muttered to the potatoes.

  “Good. OK, everyone. Scene one, A, take three.” Taj clapped his hands twice. “Action!”

  * * *

  “You like pigeon with that lotto,” said Mrs. Leung, placing a peeled potato in a bowl of water next to the colander. “Chk, chk, chk! Always scratch.”

  “What’s your birthday, Ma?” said Sam, penny poised over a Mega Millions.

  “Always scratch, always po’.”

  “I know your birthday,” Sam said. He bent his head and began to scratch.

  “I too old fo’ birthday.” Mrs. Leung shook some scabs of potato from her peeler.

  “Four and twelve and nineteen and twenty-four. I’m feeling lucky, Ma.”

  “You feel stupid, like pigeon.”

  “I need one more number. How many potatoes you have there?” But Mrs. Leung didn’t respond, so Sam went over to the bowl and counted for himself.

  “Always borrow money,” Mrs. Leung muttered.

  Sam sat back down and began to scratch.

  “I have two out of five, Ma.” Sam held the ticket up to Mrs. Leung’s back, but she didn’t turn around.

  “Ma?”

  “Your brother, he stay in China, he make big money. Big money in China. And you here! You in America, an’ still po’.”

  “I think we won something—we already won something with four—four numbers, Ma!”

  Lauren and Sasha tightened their circle around Sam and Mrs. Leung, as Taj silently conducted them from the back wall. Anna, acutely aware of her tent-size shirt and her own inactivity, felt suddenly self-conscious.

  “I think I won, Ma,” Sam said, his voice skidding higher. “Four. Twelve. Nineteen. Twenty-four. Eight.” Sam’s penny bobbed over the ticket as he counted, his voice thick with disbelief. A small pile of silver shavings had accumulated on the table.

  Lauren stepped right in front of her to bring the boom closer to Sam, and in that moment, seeing her in profile, Anna felt a jolt of recognition—it was the Celtx girl, from Café Gowanus!

  “You go to Key Food later, you get me shrim’ an’ also green banana,” Mrs. Leung said, throwing another peeled potato into the bowl.

  “Ma,” said Sam. “I won! I won, Ma!” He stood up, waving the ticket. Its foil squares glinted weakly in the light. He looked directly into the camera. “We’re rich!”

  Mrs. Leung said nothing. She turned on the tap and scraped the dirt from a potato with her fingernails.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Leung said.

  “Cut! That’s a wrap,” yelled Taj. “Fantastic.”

  Lauren lowered the boom and pulled off her headphones. “Really great, you guys.”

  “I actually won three dollars.” Sam grinned, showing his ticket to Sasha.

  Sam got up and walked over to the Buddha shrine, where he tucked the used ticket in between a pair of apples.

  “Did you get that?” Taj called out to Sasha. Sasha nodded.

  “You want me to do it again?” Sam asked. “I was going to light a stick of incense, too.”

  “Sam, you go to Key Food,” Mrs. Leung said, but no one was listening.

  “No, skip it,” said Taj. He took Lauren’s boom pole and began unscrewing the mic head.

  Anna continued to sit on the couch, feeling both exhilarated and confused. Should she offer to help? Should she ask a question? She regretted not buying a Moleskine yesterday.

  “How do you feel?” Taj said, unexpectedly plopping down on the couch next to her.

  “Well—” Anna began.

  “Totally clueless? Don’t worry.” Taj smiled. “We’ll grab a drink later and I’ll explain.”

  “OK,” Anna said, some of the awkwardness she felt lifting. “How do you feel?” But it was Lauren who answered for him.

  “Like someone going for the Gugg?” Lauren said, smiling down at Taj. She put a hand on his shoulder, but something in his face made her drop it again.

  “Thirty-seven?” It took Anna a moment to realize Lauren was talking to her. She nodded toward the door. “We need you to break down the buffet table.”

  * * *

  Anna wandered back to the table of cold food and began to stack the coffee cups. Through the window, she could see the identical red tower
s of Morris Martin Houses tessellating across identical patches of yellowed lawn. She found a box of ziplock bags under the table and bagged the scones and the minimuffins, put the tea bags back into their box. Though dogged by a feeling of age-inappropriateness, Anna did her best to keep her mind on the small picture, to not telescope out and see herself as a thirty-seven-year-old woman with a master’s degree, ziplocking minimuffins in the cul-de-sac of a Brooklyn housing project. There is no I in crew, she reminded herself. Things might not have been ideal, but it still felt good to again be the recipient of marching orders. At the very least, the inflationary spiral that had rendered the hours of her formless days all but worthless had slowed. Sure, she still felt the gentle tug of online flash sales and trending memes lapping at the edges of her consciousness, but she hadn’t checked her phone once during the shoot. Wasn’t that reason enough to celebrate? These thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps rapidly approaching. She felt an uncharacteristic burst of goodwill. She was full of patience and open to everything. If it was Taj, she would give him a big hug. If it was Lauren, she would forgive her for being beautiful. If it was Sasha, she would compliment his moves and his camera, even though it was just a crappy Zi8. Anna turned around, already beaming. But it was only Mrs. Leung. And she wanted her shirt back.

  10

  How was it that she’d never even thought of coming to a place like this? That it never occurred to her all these five-hundred-dollar-a-night hotels, glowing cubes wedged into the shadows between exhaust-darkened buildings, had bars and restaurants open to anyone? Now here they were, tucked into a leather booth with tranquilizing music throbbing overhead. Illuminated rows of Stoli, Maker’s Mark, and curaçao glowing behind the bar like the Manhattan skyline rendered in liquor.

  They were dreams. That’s what she’d learned over the first drink. Or maybe the second, while Sasha was still with them. Taj found them by putting up flyers at supermarkets and Laundromats in unlikely neighborhoods. People would call and he’d interview them about their dreams. He took the best ones and made them into films. Or was it the worst ones that became films? Anna remained confused on that point.

  Sam Leung had seen Taj’s flyer at the Key Food in Greenpoint and called right away. His dream was to win the lottery and buy his mother—who had grown up with nothing but sticks and dirt for toys—a cream-colored Aston Martin with a leather interior of breath-mint blue. And since a portion of each ticket sale went to the government, he convinced himself that playing Mega Millions was patriotic, or charitable, the same as dropping money into the March of Dimes cup next to the register. It was this combination of greed, patriotism, and filial devotion that got Sam $83,000 into debt. When he lost his house, his wife also left, together with their daughter. But he didn’t move into Morris Martin Houses with his mother until years later, by which time he’d slid quite a few more rungs down the ladder.

  “I have this book, well, actually, like three books, Moleskines, where I transcribe all the dreams,” Taj said. “And I was thinking, when it’s time for the screening I’ll exhibit them under glass, you know, like art objects.”

  “I think that’s really beautiful.” Anna knew she had to stop saying “beautiful”—she had already used the word twice when Taj explained he was giving people the chance to star in their own dreams—as well as generous. Thank God she had enough sense to stop at noble. She was a little drunk.

  “The fucked-up thing is some people’s dreams are so—I mean, you really can’t make this stuff up. The reality of it is so much better than fiction.”

  Anna nodded, picked up her cocktail, drank deeply. Instantly, she regretted the calories. She had started out with a relatively dietetic vodka tonic, but then decided to reward herself for not having any of those minimuffins from the buffet earlier by ordering a sangria. Doing some quick math, she realized she’d already lost whatever gains she’d made earlier in the day, and at this thought her eyes slipped over Taj’s shoulder to the mirrored wall where certain cold facts confronted her. It was true—she was fat. But her blue eyes were still very striking, and tonight she’d done a good job outlining them in black. Moreover, the dual benefits of bigness were also on display in the plunging décolleté of the tank top she’d worn beneath her tea-stained blouse. It was with no small satisfaction that she’d noticed Taj’s eyes dip a few times over the course of the evening. First when she opened her purse to fetch a mint, and again when she’d pretended to scan the dessert menu. Seeing herself in the mirror now, she hoped what she always hoped, that men saw her as Rubenesque. Women, she already knew, saw her only in the hypothetical sense, as pretty-if-she-lost-weight.

  They weren’t quite playing the “vulnerability game,” as Brandon would put it, but she had still learned a great deal between drinks one and three. Taj had told her about being born in India, which he couldn’t remember at all, and growing up in Kansas City with his two sisters. Neither his hobbies (squash, Final Fantasy) nor his college major (economics) or family background (both parents were doctors of the gut region), explained how he’d ended up an experimental filmmaker. In truth, he was not so different from the bright Indian guys she’d known in high school, who’d all gone on to med school or law school and, come to think of it, seemed almost supernaturally predetermined to succeed. But there was an obvious gap in Taj’s narrative, the period after college and before now when everything had changed and he’d come into his own. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming about this period, however, so Anna told him about her mother and growing up in suburban Connecticut where the streets all circled one another like bored house pets until they just collapsed into culs-de-sac. She also discovered the entirety of her time at Pinter, Chinski and Harms could be condensed into the space of one depressing tweet.

  “So how did you meet Gilman?” she finally asked. It was the arrival of drink four that gave her courage.

  “Jailbreaking his iPhone,” said Taj.

  “Random,” Anna said. Her Google searches were still turning up nothing. According to Google, there was no Gilman and Taj. No Taj and Simone. No Taj at all, actually. How could that be? It hardly seemed possible that a person who didn’t exist on the Internet could exist at all. Even Anna existed on the Internet, albeit only on Facebook, uninteresting mentions in the PCH newsletter, and, worst of all, the Association for the Advancement of East European, Slavic, and Eurasian Languages and Literature website, which listed her as a Ph.D. even though she’d only managed to slink out of Columbia with a master’s. She poked at her ice cubes with a stirrer straw, trying to deduce how Gilman and Taj’s relationship had progressed from this quotidian hipster interaction to, well, whatever it had become.

  “Was it a setup for another one of his movies?” she joked.

  “1-800-Jailbreak. Ha-ha. No, that would be too boring even for Gilman.” For a moment his face clouded over. “Humiliating people is the only thing that gets Paul’s rocks off.” And as Taj’s eyes flitted over the drink-bearing torsos passing by their booth, she realized the feeling between them was slipping away. She regretted bringing the conversation around to Gilman. “But enough about me,” he said, throwing back the rest of his drink.

  “No!” Anna piped, knowing she was scraping conversational resin from the bowl but unable to help herself. “It’s not.”

  It was too late, though. Taj had clearly already hit some internal reset button.

  “You know what I love about this place?” he said. Knowing she had only the flimsiest reason to hope the answer might be her, them, Anna leaned forward anyway. “The bathrooms,” Taj continued, raising a finger for the waitress. “The walls are all one-way mirrors. It’s totally fucked. You should check it out.”

  * * *

  The next morning, in their bathroom, Anna asked Brie why they had never bothered to move the mirror down. They were both standing at the sink, brushing their teeth and staring at their eyebrows in the mirror. The mirror had always been too high. When they put on lipstick, they had to jump for just a brief glimp
se of their mouths.

  “I thought it was bolted to the wall, but I think those are just big nails,” Anna said, pointing her toothbrush at the waterlogged wallpaper near the ceiling, the twin disks of rust holding up the mirror.

  “Pain in the ass,” Brie spat, wiping her mouth on Anna’s bath towel. “What kind of crazy shit were you listening to last night?”

  “I can’t pronounce the name,” Anna said. “It was a Chinese lullaby.” She had googled “Chinese lullaby” when she got home and learned the Chinese do not, in fact, yell at their babies. The songs were dulcet, almost cloying. These moments of enlightenment, Anna hoped, would help dispel her latent racism. It certainly strengthened her resolve to pursue the Middle Way. The Chinese were nothing if not enigmatic in their balancing embrace of disparate extremes.

  “Huh. I was just thinking it reminded me of this new band we’re working. They sound totally Chinese even though they grew up in Florida.”

  “What are they called?”

  “Cheap Sex,” said Brie. “It’s brilliant. Electro-dance party with Cheap Sex. Get it?”

  “Oh,” said Anna, pausing to spit. “Ha-ha.”

  “If you want to be my plus one, they’re playing Santos House on Friday.”

  “I can’t,” Anna said, “I have a thing.” When they parted ways last night, Taj told her to meet him in Bushwick on Friday and to keep her day clear.

  “OK,” Brie said. “Next time.”

  But on her way back to her room, Anna wondered when the next time would be. The last time Brie had invited her to go anywhere had been ages ago. In the beginning—the honeymoon phase of their roomiedom—Brie had dragged her everywhere. Art-show openings, readings, Roller Derby matches, indie-rock shows. But Anna had sulked, hadn’t she? There was no better word for it. She had no one to talk to at the after parties, and ended up drifting around with her sad plate of cheese and crackers, unsuccessfully trying to attach herself to various groups. A moon without a planet. She had found the readings tedious. (Was she missing something or was this about watching a person sit on a folding chair and read from a book for an hour?) And what about poetry? God, poetry! She wanted to like it—could even remember reading some good stuff in college—but to her it sounded like these people were just pulling random words from a bingo tumbler. No matter how dismal the attendance, a dude with a safari-grade lens on his camera would always be on hand, circling whatever scruffy trust-fund kid happened to be on stage, intent on documenting every itch-inducing minute of this nonevent.