Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  “We’ve got pay-per-view right here,” I said, standing up to push the desk back against the wall. But Emily caught my arm and shook her head, knowing I’d sit right back down. “For all the movies you watch, we haven’t ordered a single one since we started coming here.”

  “Next time,” she said, strumming her fingernails along the heating vent. “I promise. Anyway, my Pulgasari dream was so real, I remember thinking that being a spy is basically the same as being an actor, except without the audience. It’s perfect in so many ways. But anyway, there I was in North Korea, mingling with the enemy. So one day over tea my friend keeps staring at me, giving off a major impression that she’s figured out I’m not who I say I am. You work for the Americans, she finally tells me. But I’m still not afraid because I know we can never be defeated. Under Kim Jong-il’s leadership, our resolve will never be silenced. You think you’ve learned our secrets, but you haven’t learned anything. We can even breathe underwater.”

  Emily laughed a heinous little laugh. I threw my arm over her shoulder and closed my eyes, like I’d had too long a day to stay awake another minute. But Emily pulled a hair from the top of my head, accusing me of professionally offending her by falling asleep during her performance. She lit a cigarette and shoved it in my mouth. I sat up again and leaned my cheek against the cold window, staring out over a thin stretch of woods toward the blinking lights on University.

  “So is this friend a government official or something?”

  “She’s just a regular old cadre,” Emily said. “But her husband works in a secret nuclear facility. He’s the real target.”

  “All right,” I said. “So what happens next?”

  “I decide to act like I’m actually a government agent hunting coun terrevolutionaries, not telling her as much, but hinting that I’m proud of her and that I hope she continues saying everything she’s supposed to say to pass my test. Come on, I tell her. Nobody can breathe underwater. But she just smiles and drinks her tea, like every time I open my mouth I’m just convincing her even more that I’m a spy. We can, she says. It’s a routine element of our training. Since everyone does military service, everyone can do it. I end up laughing, realizing that I’m trapped because I trust this woman, she’s my best friend actually, and now I really want to know how she learned to breathe underwater. So I play it like no one in my home village has ever heard of such training, which makes sense because we’re mountain people and we train differently. But my friend only gets angry, telling me she’s sick of my lies. She knocks her cup of tea onto the floor. You’re too cocky, little sister. Think about it. H2O. That’s two oxygen molecules for every one hydrogen. That’s enough to keep breathing.”

  Emily paused for a moment, smirking as she flashed one finger, then two, then one finger, then two. “Go on,” I said.

  “You’re thinking about it, right?”

  “I’m thinking what you would look like in sandals and one of those r ice-paddy hats.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s the next scene. My friend insists on showing me how she can breathe underwater, which is great, except now I’m starting to realize that this is probably just a trick to take me down to the rice paddy and kill me. But of course I follow her anyway. I watch her wade into the knee-deep water. I do everything she asks me to do, even though I have no idea how this will turn out. It’s all a matter of willpower, belief, mental toughness, she says. She lies on her back so that only the tips of her feet are above water, completely submerging herself and gripping the rice stalks to keep from floating back up. Twenty seconds pass, then forty, a minute, a minute and a half. When her legs stop moving I get scared and grab her shirt, but as soon as I pull her up she kicks and slaps my arm away. Actually, that’s not what happened. She didn’t just slap my arm. She gave me a big okay sign, which I guess was a joke, since giving an okay is such an American thing to do. Anyway, a couple more minutes go by. The routine continues. I get worried again and try to pull her out, but she flashes me another okay and stays under. After about ten minutes she finally stands up. She’s covered in mud, which she wipes from her forehead and cheeks, but she’s not at all out of breath. Are you ready to join us yet? she asks me. Are you ready to believe?”

  I laughed Emily’s heinous little laugh, which I thought would tidily wrap up the story. But Emily repeated her “Are you ready to believe?” line; this time her Asian accent dropped off and her voice rose just enough to let me know that she wasn’t acting anymore, that she was herself again and she was asking me a direct question. She took my cigarette and stole the last puff.

  “It’s a good story,” I said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed, okay?”

  “Do you think it would work? Do you think if I filled the bathtub that you could breathe underwater?”

  “How could I even try without knowing the secret? Your friend never actually revealed how she breathed underwater.”

  “I didn’t tell you the end of the dream,” she said. “I could tell you the secret if you feel like testing it?”

  I pushed off the windowsill, walking around the disarrayed room, trying to decide where to start first. “Maybe it’s time for a new film series,” I said, throwing the comforter back on the bed. “I think all that propaganda is starting to work.”

  “Of course it is. Propaganda works like magic. It’s probably the reason why I rented a room at the Days Inn instead of Best Western. Advertising and propaganda are basically the same thing. You can think you’re smarter than both of them, but once they get their jingles into your brain, repeating over and over, there’s not much you can do.”

  I nodded along, deciding that the best way to get her to bed would be to limit my answers to nods and head shakes, to remain as quiet as possible while moving the furniture back. But as I was searching for my wallet, I was struck by the exact sort of jingle she was talking about and couldn’t hold back from singing it out. “Don’t baste your barbecue, don’t baste your barbecue . . . it’s what you do when you barbecue . . . you gotta Maull it!”

  “Exactly,” she said, returning the telephone to the nightstand, then switching it with the lamp on the other side. “Maull’s Barbecue Sauce. I wouldn’t baste my barbecue if my life depended on it. I Maull that shit every time.”

  “You gotta Maull it,” I repeated, still considering her challenge to breathe underwater in the bathtub. I placed my hands over the heater, noticing all the lit billboards across the horizon with their familiar advertisements for gas station convenient stores, the latest fast-food inventions, winter clearances at malls and sporting goods stores.

  “So Peyton’s dad wanted you in his shoe commercial, huh?” I watched Emily’s reflection in the window as she pushed a chair back under the desk. “Did you run into him at the mall or something? You never said anything about seeing him over the summer.”

  “Oh that,” she said, sighing like I’d just ruined an interesting conversation. She pulled the chair out again and plopped down in it. “I can’t believe it took you this long to ask. I didn’t tell you about seeing him because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Has anyone ever told you that you’re sensitive, George? You’re really touchy sometimes.”

  “You still haven’t told me,” I said, turning around. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened the way you’re probably imagining it, even if we did go on a date. I mean, I’d rather not call it that, but I guess that’s what it was. A few weeks after the funeral we went to a movie. Immediately afterward I made him take me home.”

  I turned back to the window, struck by the same instinct to flee I’d felt earlier in the night when she kept shouting and biting as we screwed. (I’d spent half the session staring at the little red light on the phone in anticipation of a call from the motel manager.) It didn’t help that I was still stoned and that Emily was broaching the subject as though it didn’t mean a thing.

  “What happened?” I asked, inadvertently revealing all the jealousy and distrust she’d preemptively accused me of.r />
  “I told you what happened. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was lonely and thought he was the sort of person I could go out with who wouldn’t try to give me any genius advice. I just couldn’t take any more advice, and I was tired of being alone.”

  “You called him?” I asked, already tormenting myself with Peyton’s double-dealing condolences, Emily’s desperate grief, their violent kisses in the back of his car.

  “I needed to get out of the house,” she said, wrapping the phone cord around her arm. “You can’t imagine what it was like eating dinner with my parents, having my mom hug me good night and thinking, She’s faking it. She doesn’t love me at all. She thinks I lied to them, and she doesn’t even love me anymore.”

  “She knows you’re angry with her,” I said, crouching down next to her. “She probably just doesn’t know how to act while she and your dad are still sorting things out.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I don’t know either, but I think you made the right decision coming home. Even if they’re not talking much, it would be much worse if you weren’t there.”

  Emily unwrapped the cord from around her arm and hung up the receiver. She started paging through a motel brochure she must’ve paged through fifty times before. I stepped into the bathroom, fully aware of her difficulty in meeting my eyes. “If you don’t want to talk about your date with Peyton,” I said, squeezing toothpaste onto my brush, “it’s all right. I’ll just forget it and trust that nothing happened.”

  Emily slapped the desk and laughed. Her laugh said everything it needed to about my insecurities. The lighter sparked as she lit another cigarette. I was brushing my teeth, expecting another long, silent night, when she started delving into the details, more apologetically than I expected.

  “He brought up the commercial idea after the movie. By then I already knew I’d made a mistake in going out with him. I knew I’d made a mistake before the movie even started. But when I told him to take me home, he kept fighting me about it. He kept talking about some college party on the South Side and trying to hook up with me. Eventually he gave up, but for a few weeks after that he kept calling the house late at night, usually drunk. He’d hang up whenever my parents answered.”

  I spit and watched the toothpaste swirl down the drain, asking myself for the first time if I believed her. I stared into the bathroom mirror, questioning whether she’d dreamt that story about being a spy or simply made it up just to tease me. I wiped my mouth and stepped back into the doorway. Emily was leaning over the desk with her hands flat on the glass top, silhouetted in the low-wattage lamp, her head low and heavy like an old bull.

  “I suppose your parents think it was me calling, huh? After my call from Colorado, it only makes sense.”

  “I told them it wasn’t you,” she said, slowly turning her head so that her hair fell in and out of the lamplight. “But like I said, they don’t trust me. And to tell you the truth, I don’t even blame them anymore. I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

  “So I shouldn’t trust you, either, I guess?”

  “Whatever, George. I’m sick of arguing. Think whatever you want to think.”

  “I wish I could,” I said, grabbing my T-shirt and pants from the back of the door handle. “Your parents must think I’m a real prankster.”

  “Go ahead and go. I know you’re already sick of this place. I’m sorry I even called.”

  I pulled my pants and shirt on as fast as I could, grabbing my shoes and preparing to storm out, still swinging my belt and kicking the walls. (I considered breaking the full-length mirror, but didn’t when I realized the action would prove far less poignant than it did in the Mexican drama I was recalling, involving a two-faced maid and her matron’s heirloom.) But I couldn’t find my socks and ended up scrambling on all fours, searching around the desk and nightstands, lying on the carpet reaching under the bed with my head pinned to the floor. Ten minutes later when I still couldn’t find them, I stepped into the bathroom and unthinkingly opened the faucet to fill the tub. Emily told me it was all her fault. I told her it was all mine.

  Forty-six

  If my account of these bleak months feels hurried and disrespectful of its odd moments of tenderness and teary affection, it is only because my stomach still bears the thorns of our sharp-tongued exchanges (which often burrow deeper during the brief, so-called power naps that I’ve now forbidden myself). While the majority of our disturbances contained obvious links to the unfortunate chain of events that began at Saylorville Lake, Emily and I also found ourselves wading through a host of unrelated anxieties, as though Katie’s death had opened the floodgates for all our private horrors—past, present, and future—which our foolish bodies attempted to purge in one fell swoop. Instead of assuaging our respective fears we poked and prodded them, soon arriving at a bitter acknowledgment that there were simply no effective words to speed their course. It seemed our whole lives had been whittled down to our Days Inn motel room, where more than once Emily articulated her dreary future of anonymous back-alley auditions with seedy, second-rate agents whose nineteen-year-old product was already damaged goods. When she wasn’t practicing her lines in the bathroom mirror (or speechifying in an actor’s warm-up gibberish that I could never decode), she racked up pay-per-view charges for movies she barely watched, usually after ordering Italian and Greek restaurant deliveries for meals she hardly touched. At least once a week we’d accuse each other of being clueless or hopeless or insane, which might’ve easily been construed as true, especially considering the subjects of our quality-time debates, not the least of which involved wagering on when her mom would finally open one of her credit card bills and uncover our secret. But I played along with our little scam, typically encouraging Emily to order us the most expensive items on the delivery menus, pretending not to notice that she could hardly swallow two bites of a Caesar salad, that oftentimes we weren’t even kissing or using protection, that in sex she was like a rude dog with its ass in the air, jaw clamped shut and eyes clenched, masturbating herself while I gripped her hips and ankles like handlebars, pumping madly and all the while feeling like a snake oil salesman in a two-timing affair with the only girl I ever wanted to love. For better or worse we stuck together, likely as a result of the exchanges relegated to the hours of our separation when we’d lie in our childhood beds with the lights out, whispering by radio with such tenderness and understanding that I was able to set out each morning optimistically indulgent in hope—that cruel crutch known as much for its trickery and ravage as its splendor.

  Forty-seven

  I received my first speeding ticket on the night of the Tinker premiere—knocked down from the insurance-raising eighty-five miles per hour to seventy-five, which I accepted as a upbeat omen—while racing home from the fairgrounds in order to shower and shave, then sprint back east to the historic Sherman Hills district in my new pair of wool pants and herringbone blazer, forgoing the customary tie because I’d worn my only decent one to Katie’s funeral. The Garage Theater turned out to be housed in a converted mansion, which I entered by way of a long set of creaking wooden stairs ending at the front door, followed by an elegantly dusty foyer manned by a college student in a black turtleneck sitting at a card table with one hand limp over the cash lockbox like he was swearing himself in. (While he harbored obvious ambitions for the theater, any noticeable talent was supplanted by his priggish attitude in securing my eight dollars before allowing me to peruse the playbill.) In an area of the house where one would normally expect to enter a kitchen or living room, I parted my way through a velvet curtain to discover a long and narrow theater space with an unexpectedly high ceiling, though dark to the point of nearly total obscurity. While imagining that each patch of unseen audience represented a formal faction of the metropolitan arts community, I felt my way along the side aisle, choosing a folding chair in one of the mid-front rows in order to avoid unnerving Emily by sitting too close. My eyes adjusted to the darkness as a pair of Drake
track runners still in their warm-ups sat down in the row behind me, swapping impersonations of faggoty theater types. A group of camera-toting family members crowded in next to me, the grandmother giving me the willies when she covered my right leg in the shawl she was wrapping over her cold knees and ankles.

  About five minutes before the play began, when the theater was only a third full and the ticket prig was ordering us all closer to the front, somewhere in the lurching darkness I spied a familiar voice arguing the threat posed by such hazardously poor lighting. (When it came to family and friends, Emily always pushed for their attendance at mid-run performances, particularly in the case of her mother, who was also her harshest critic; apparently Mrs. Schell couldn’t wait.) I turned my attention to the details of the set design, dominated by a canvas backdrop of a crummy city comprised of pointy tenements overshadowed by a Gothic church. The stage was extremely tight with much evidence of fire safety irregularity, highlighted by cheap yellow bulbs poking through the canvas, posing as lampposts, and nests of electrical wires at each end of the stage feeding stage lights with unprotected bulbs. I tried not to care if Mrs. Schell noticed me or not.

  The lights went up and Emily was the first actor to appear, though it took me a few seconds to recognize her. While I’d imagined her gypsy character bold and vivacious, costumed in variegated skirts and scarves that would launch her forth from the set like a Technicolor Dorothy after ages of black-and-white, instead the costume designers had obscured her with a tangle-haired wig, filthy sneakers, and a bra that slung one breast high and the other low. She wandered to the center of the stage, then plopped down cross-legged to hawk change on an imaginary street corner, her eyes twitching in hungry suffering as formally dressed pedestrians crossed left and right, unnoticing of the tinker, who was apparently meant to blend chameleon-like into the sooty set. (These “pedestrians” made no more than eight to ten strides before being forced to stop and portend window-gazing reflection while waiting for their fellow extras coming up the steps.) Emily’s accent was like nothing we’d ever heard.