by Samuel Park
Everything else was superfluous. The living focus on what they could gain, and pay no mind to what they could lose.
I watched as the sun made diagonal stripes on the floor, taking over more and more territory. The sun shone only in spots, as if drained through a sieve. The sun made objects shine as if the light came from within them. I could see the rays turning her hair into a torch, her skin ablaze with a pellucid glow. She was one of those objects, too, shining, shining—being loved by that rambunctious, boisterous star.
chapter eleven
IT WAS A THURSDAY AFTERNOON when nelson came by to visit Kathryn. I served them coffee and the lemon pound cake he had brought.
“You look really good, by the way,” said Nelson.
“I’ve lost a vicious amount of weight,” Kathryn replied.
“I can’t really tell. I’d never know you were sick just from looking at you.”
“I’m not sick at all. This is a big, elaborate ruse for me to get some attention.”
Nelson laughed. I handed Kathryn her coffee, then Nelson his.
I didn’t expect him to track me down an hour later, as I made a grocery list in the kitchen.
“I just wanted to show you something quick,” said Nelson.
“Where’s Kathryn?”
“She went upstairs to watch TV,” he said.
I did not move, and Nelson stroked his chin awkwardly as it dawned on him that the transaction would happen right there in front of the kitchen sink. He reached for his wallet and pulled out a clipping from a newspaper. He unfolded it carefully, the same way I imagined he’d folded it in the first place. I could tell Nelson had not torn off the article; he’d clipped it with a pair of scissors, the borders clean and even. I felt a fondness for the clipping, how it had sat in between the folds of his wallet for however long, waiting for me.
“Brazil is reopening the investigations of torture during the dictatorship,” said Nelson, paraphrasing the headline I was now reading. “They’re prosecuting the people responsible, releasing their names.”
I was jolted. Were they really going to go after the guilty parties? I began to skim the paragraphs, trying not to let my shock unfurl against the neat black and white newsprint. That piece of paper seemed to contain the entire world—past, present, and future.
“Why are you showing this to me?” I asked.
“Just the way your face looked the other day.” Nelson added, “I thought you might be interested.”
“I am interested. But not in the way you’re assuming. My mother wasn’t . . . She wasn’t tortured,” I said, folding the clipping in his palm. “In fact, quite the opposite. She was a collaborator. With the military police.”
Nelson furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“She gave away names,” I said. “She gave away information. Almost like a . . . like a spy? Like a double agent.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” I nodded bitterly. “You always figure you’re talking to a victim. Or the family of a victim. But what if you’re the perpetrator?” I sighed. “But it doesn’t matter; she’s dead now.”
His face darkened and he put the clipping back in his wallet. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize she was—”
I shook my head, touched by the genuine intensity of his concern. “It’s because I still talk about her like she’s alive. I like to think she still is, somewhere.”
“Yeah, I thought she was still alive, just not near you,” he said kindly, and I felt an overwhelming urge to wrap my arms around him.
“Yeah, it must be confusing, but I can’t use the past tense when I talk about her. She exists to me, just on a different plane. I mean, literally, she is, not was, in her grave in Brazil. But she’s all around me. In my thoughts. I know my mother, and I know that’s what she wanted most. To be remembered.”
“How long ago did she die?” he asked.
“I know. I’m in denial. But denial is not a bad place to be, contrary to popular belief. She’s still around, I’m just not able to speak to her.”
There was an awkward pause and then Nelson asked, “Do you want to . . . do you want to talk about what happened?”
“What’s there to say? When she died, I felt so abandoned. I was so mad at her for dying. I used to worship her when I was little.”
“How did she die?” asked Nelson.
“In infamy,” I said. It was the first thought that crossed my mind. “But I shouldn’t say that, should I? I mean, it’s one thing to say bad things about her when she’s alive, but I can’t speak ill of her when she’s dead. She can’t defend herself.”
I covered my face with my hands.
“Don’t try to censor yourself,” said Nelson, gently. “You feel how you feel.”
Here, in front of me, was an educated, kindly man who wouldn’t judge me or diminish my pain. “It’s hard to say this out loud but . . . When I said that she gave away information . . . Well, that led to the deaths of six innocent people.” A shadow crossed over my body. “I used to think she was an angel, but now I wonder . . .”
Nelson narrowed his eyes. “Either way you exalt her, make her out to be larger than life? What if she was just a person, and she made a mistake?”
“Did you hear what I said?” I asked, in agony. “People died because of her.”
“I don’t know the circumstances, but I know it must have been a violent and complicated time.”
I wasn’t sure how to even begin to tell Nelson how she had been responsible. I boiled it down to basic facts: She deceived people and they died because of it. When I was done, Nelson didn’t seem to share in my antagonism.
“It sounds like your mother got caught up in matters that were out of her depth,” said Nelson, scratching his chin for a second or two. “But that doesn’t make her a murderer.”
“People died because of her!” And besides Octopus, La Bardot, the others . . . how many more people—their relatives, their lovers—had suffered because of her? I wanted to forgive her. But how could I? She’d lied to me. When I felt charitable, I told myself that she’d chosen wrongly many, many years ago, and had already paid for it. But I often didn’t feel like being charitable.
“You’re making her so important. You’re using her mistake to keep her on a pedestal. You’re giving her a bigger role than maybe she had.”
“Role,” I scoffed. “That’s ironic.”
“What is?”
“Nothing.” I sat down at the kitchen table. I felt like I’d waited years to talk about this with someone smart and educated enough to understand, and now that the opportunity had arrived, I no longer had the desire to do so. “Don’t get me wrong. I love her.”
“You love her but you don’t forgive her for her mistakes?” repeated Nelson, as he sat down next to me.
“Sometimes I do. But lying to me was more than a mistake,” I said, tugging my hair.
“I can see why she did, though,” said Nelson, resting his hand reassuringly over my knee.
“No, you don’t get it. Something this big, you never get over.” As I pulled away from Nelson, he almost lost his balance. “And I think you should go, before Kathryn sees you.”
He stood up and from the kitchen doorway said, “I think she didn’t want to lose her stature in front of you.” He paused, as if thinking this over. “But don’t make a god out of her. It’s hard to forgive God, but you can forgive a person.”
Kathryn radiated an almost palpable sadness for the rest of the day after Nelson’s visit. It was like a ghoulish cape. She created a silence between us, and into that silence I stepped, asking, “How was the visit with Mr. Nelson? Was it good to see him?”
She sighed and shuffled to a nearby stool, her slight frame making it look massive beneath her. “I wish I’d worked things out with him before it was too late,” said Kathryn, looking wan. “I didn’t know back then, that I might not have the years to waste. Everyone else, they can fuck around for ten, maybe even twenty years—they can afford it. But I
can’t.”
“Are you sure it’s too late?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, once you’ve poisoned the well, you can’t drink from it. But I did love him.”
Why wasn’t love enough? Love was everything, but it wasn’t enough.
“My God, what a waste,” exclaimed Kathryn, looking up at the ceiling. Something in her voice made me think she was about to cry. “I used to think, we humans make so many mistakes, it takes so many tries to get it right, it’s a good thing that life is long. But I was wrong. Sometimes you have to get it right the first time.”
I nodded helplessly, trying to find the right words to comfort her. “I’m sorry, Kathryn.”
“What a fuck-up. What a huge fuck-up, on both of our parts.”
“You can’t fix it?” I asked, wondering if mistakes could be erased, or redeemed.
“No,” said Kathryn, wryly, running her fingers along her fine hair. “They make it seem so romantic in the movies. But who wants to kiss a sick person? Who’d want to be in a relationship with me now? What is the point of being with someone with an expiration date?”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said, shaking my head.
“It’s not true? And I can’t even complain, because it’d be weird if cancer did turn him on.”
“You’re not cancer,” I said, reaching out to pat her lightly on her arm. “You’re Kathryn.”
Kathryn thought about that for a second and then said, “And it takes a lot of confidence to make someone love you for who you are. I don’t know if I have that.”
“Why’re you talking like this?” I asked, gently.
Her eyelids hung low, exhausted. “I know. It’s awful. This disease. I hate the bitterness that comes with it.”
“You’re not bitter. You’re going to be fine, Kathryn. I know that.”
“No, I won’t. The ultimate goal is not to convince myself that nothing bad’s going to happen. The goal is to know something bad will happen but still be okay with it.”
“That sounds like a terribly difficult thing to do.”
Kathryn laughed devastatingly. “It is impossible to do. But thank you for saying that. For trying.”
Surely I’d gleaned some pearl of wisdom I could share with Kathryn after everything with my mother’s death. But I couldn’t think of anything, other than saying that losing a loved one was terrible and awful.
I realized then that I hated when people tried to find the silver lining in tragedy. There was no upside, none. I did not grow from it, or become a better person, or learn to appreciate life, or any such cliché. Kathryn’s death would not seed some kind of beautiful legacy any more than my mother’s had. It’d just make those she left behind feel sad and morose.
I didn’t tell her any of this, but I moved closer to her, to let her know I was still there.
That night the lights went off, as though the universe was not the result of complex ongoing electromagnetic reactions, but merely reflected the moods of a single individual. Kathryn was already in bed, and I alone experienced the sudden disappearance of electricity, the TV and the lamp bulb dying together. I looked out the window and saw the streetlamp still shining its stubborn light, and the neighbor’s house still glowing through its tiny squares. For a second it made sense to me that I was in the dark, the outside mirroring my inside.
I called Nelson for help. I was hesitant, but I couldn’t go home with the refrigerator not running. I didn’t want to wake Kathryn, and Nelson was the only other person who knew how the house worked.
He arrived ten minutes later and I greeted him by the back door.
“Have you tried the circuit breaker?” he asked, as he walked past me into the kitchen. He was wearing a worn-out white T-shirt stamped with the words St. Louis 5K Run and navy lounge pants. I was struck by his casualness, arriving essentially in his pajamas. This was his old house, though, so maybe his casualness had to do with where he was going, rather than whom he was coming to.
“I hope you’re not afraid of the dark,” said Nelson, a smile in his voice.
“Only if there’s serial killers on the loose,” I said, prompting a laugh from him.
I followed him in. Nelson had no trouble navigating in the dark. Like a pro, he had brought a flashlight. I held it and guided it to a corner of the room-sized pantry.
He easily found the circuit board and struggled, with both hands, to undo its tight latch and get it opened. Like most expensive things, it was built to look exquisite when it worked, but be totally inconvenient when it didn’t. As the light illuminated both his fingers and his nearby face, I could see the attentive expressions forming around his eyes and lips, the gritting of teeth and furrowing of brows. My face was only a couple of feet from his, and there was something improbably romantic about the whole thing. Only a couple of hours earlier Kathryn had rhapsodized nearby, and maybe the molecules of her own desire lingered, waiting for a new host. There could be no other explanation for the closeness that I felt for Nelson at that moment, one that I immediately decided to stifle.
The L-shaped latch gave way to the circuit board and Nelson quickly flipped a series of switches, pausing a few seconds, and then flipping them again in the opposite direction. As soon as he did so, the sound of a cheerful TV jingle broke the silence and a small, washed-out light shone from the living room a few yards away. The rest of the house remained dark. The refrigerator, my main concern, began to hum quietly.
It was very anticlimactic.
The low light flooding in from the rest of the house was really not enough to illuminate our faces. I could see an overall shape of Nelson, and suddenly then, I could sense his head inch closer to mine. Slowly, tentatively, awaiting a pulling back. I moved closer, and our faces matched up by instinct, by memory, no different from Nelson feeling his way through the dark, familiar house earlier. Soon our lips touched, and I felt my body flood with the opposite of everything Kathryn had spoken of—not regret but fondness, not bitterness but joy, not disappointment but hope.
After that, maybe trying to escape the kiss, which we did not acknowledge, or seeing that he’d overstayed his reasons for coming, Nelson took the flashlight back and left the house, moving a little more quietly than he had when he’d first come in. I followed him out, the way I would do with any guest, a pace or two behind him.
Before he went out the door, Nelson turned to me and said, “You’re going to try to make yourself feel bad later. I advise you not to.”
The next day tipped upside down and I couldn’t figure out how to get it right side up. First, Kathryn had me drive her to Nelson’s hospital without arranging to see him. A surprise, she said, to thank him for his visit. There, the receptionist said that Nelson was at lunch, but she was welcome to wait. Kathryn and I sat in the waiting room, which was screened off from the elevator area through a transparent, crystal-like hanging wall, the kind of wall that divided but did not separate.
Across from us sat an old man. He was an albino with prominent white eyebrows, and a head conspicuously large relative to his wiry frame. Next to him, a younger-looking woman with long hair read a magazine spread like a scroll over her lap. She could be either his wife or his daughter, and though they were sitting next to each other, her body language made no claim for him.
I reached for a Time magazine lying on the seat next to me. There was a gigantic sticker on the cover, which read: “Property of UCLA Oncology. Do not remove from the Lobby Area.” The same white sticker was on all the magazines, and to me, they seemed a little dramatic and unnecessary.
“Could you go to the cafeteria and get me some coffee?” asked Kathryn, handing me a five-dollar bill. “You know how I like it.”
At the cafeteria, I spotted Nelson at one of the tables in the back. I hesitated at first, but then walked up to him. It looked like he was finished with his food. I told him that Kathryn was waiting.
“Why? Is she not feeling well?” asked Nelson.
“No, she’s fine, but she wanted to see you. I think she�
��s feeling a little needy,” I said.
“All right, I can help her with that,” said Nelson, clearing the crumbs off the table. “And you? How are you? I’ve been thinking about you and your mother.”
I sat down across from him on the plastic chair. “You know what I like about Americans?”
“What?”
“Your compassion,” I said, smiling. “Like the compassion you offered my mother the other day.”
“Everyone deserves compassion and kindness,” said Nelson, as though this were his official diagnosis. I looked away, to a nearby window. I spotted a bird, imagined it chirping mellifluously. “You want to know what I think?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
Nelson chuckled. “I’ll tell you anyway. I think the anger is a scab you’re afraid to pick at in case blood starts spurting out.” Nelson reached for my arm and put his hand over it. “But maybe if you remove the scab you’ll find that your skin has healed underneath.”
I swallowed. If my mother was the flood, I wondered if Nelson might be an insurance adjuster coming to my aid. I reached for his face and pecked him on the cheek, a token of my gratitude. Nelson drew me in for a kindly embrace, and I let him envelop me. His body felt good against me. We stayed sealed like that for a while, without letting go. Behind him, I looked out through the window for the chirping bird. In the distance, I caught a glimpse of a woman standing haloed by the sun behind her.
I saw her expressions first, before I could fully designate their owner—confusion, followed by horror, followed by anger. It was Kathryn.
I drew away from Nelson. I felt a panic rise in my body. I looked at Nelson, trying to communicate without words what I had seen, but when I looked in the direction of the apparition again, it was gone. Kathryn wasn’t there. There wasn’t even a woman who resembled her. Had I just imagined it? There’s no way Kathryn could’ve appeared and disappeared so quickly, within the blink of an eye. Either she’d been there and still was, or she’d never been there, to begin with.
Nothing about that day had fundamentally changed—the sun still shone too much, the birds were still chirping in tune—but just like that, nothing seemed the same, either.
