The Loch Ness Monster, and KRYSTAL YANG How We Breathe

The Loch Ness Monster, and How We Breathe

KRYSTAL YANG

I know one truth. That is, I believe one thing: my father left us the day I was born. My mother told me that she was forced to drive herself to the hospital, because he had folded his face between her legs and refused to come out, stuck in some wild, hormonal hibernation until the doctors anaesthetized him along with my mother. And when she opened her eyes after the C-section, he was gone. My mother refused to tell me why he left. The answer must have been like a family heirloom, a piece of buried treasure bulging from her heart like the cancer that metastasized in her chest when she turned sixty. Good fortune, she liked to tell me, didn’t run in our blood. (I do not think I believe her.) In my dreams, he was always searching for her. He was a shadow stooped low over the horizon, as real as a plastic submarine, and she was the ghost of a conch shell, echoing from the ambient noise when you cocked your ear against her stomach. My father and I, we would close our eyes and hold our breaths, and listen to how her insides resonated at a slower and deeper frequency, like the groaning of her voice when she hummed along to the car radio. We would wrap ourselves around her waist, letting the vibrations push through us, and I would wake up with a raging fever and my eyes burning from sleep.

My mother and I visited him every summer at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The one with the big spinning mushroom ride and the colorful arcade with pink jawbreakers and expired glow-inthe-dark bubblegum hanging like plastic corpses from the entrance. We would blow ten dollars on the dumb claw machine games before making our way down to the pier. I would try to walk across the sand in a straight line, leaving a trail of grimy footprints as bait to be devoured by the water or the fish or whatever things lived underwater. I liked to waddle in after my mother, my hands balled into empty fists and tucked into the crevices on either side of my nose to form a pair of fleshy binoculars. We would trudge deeper and deeper until the back and forth of the tide made us dizzy, but we were desperate and the ocean was always opaque with nothing.

For my parents’ ten-year anniversary, my mother mailed old wedding photos to our friends. I remember staring at the man in the pictures, at his gently-sloping nose and freckles and opposable thumbs. I imagined him swallowing me whole. I imagined myself burning with shame, searing a hole through his belly and tumbling feet-first into the icy Pacific. Sometimes I dreamt of drying up the entire ocean with my body. I told my mother this once, when I was fourteen and we were spending Christmas at the Boardwalk, our toes wrinkling from the cold, damp sand as other families waddled around us in thick winter coats. She started crying, and I felt so awkward standing there that I cried too. We cried and cried until our eyes hurt and the water streaking down our face left white grime on our cheeks. And when we couldn’t cry anymore, my mother rolled up her pants and soaked her toes in shipwrecked seaweed along the shore, wove her fingers around her waist and filled the chilling air with her stories—punctuated by soft hiccups and whimpers—about the wedding, or how my father was now the length of the highway outside our house, or how she missed having wild, passionate sex with him in the upstairs bathtub filled with Epsom salt. Our Boardwalk rituals: an almost-truth. We also collected scraps around the house and lugged them to the beach. My mother liked to throw things into the water for him— aspirin tablets, condoms, bridal magazines stuffed into wine bottles. I liked helping her. It was an alien catharsis, copying the stroke of my mother’s right arm, launching books and flowers into the swell of the tide, not quite sure where or what or who I was aiming at. Once we drew pictures in school for Father’s Day and I got put in detention for telling the teacher that I was going to throw my artwork into the ocean. When my mother got the call, she threatened to sue the principal and signed me up for swimming lessons the next day.

I got in trouble at school a lot. There was also this instance in third grade, when we had to fill out worksheets about ourselves. Draw a picture of your family, describe what you wanted to be when you grew up. I told the teacher “I don’t know” and she said “try your best” so I ripped the paper into thirds and balled them up in my hands. I pretend to throw them, like I was on the beach, like my dad was going to stay underwater forever and I was going to make my mother laugh and catalyze a reaction that formed those wrinkles

When I wasn’t thinking about the beach, I was thinking about the day he left, about the way my mother might have pushed her skirt up around her stomach and stared at the tops of his lashes from the space between her knees while their cold sweat pooled together in a salty, sour soup.

I usually came home to find my mother pacing around the house, walking towards her bedroom before turning around and running to the front door, then shuffling back to the bedroom, back and forth like a wave that couldn’t decide how to break against the rocks.

When I was in high school, I wanted to work at the local aquarium. The lady in charge made me fill out information about my parents. I told her that I couldn’t write down the name of my father. She glared at me. I remember there was a wart on her nose. It drooped so low that it practically touched her upper lip. She asked me if I never learned how to write, but I had to explain to her that yes, I could write, yes, I could also read, no, I didn’t think the name people called my father was actually his name.

On my twenty-first birthday, I asked my mother for two things. That is, I asked my mother for two more truths. His name, his eye color. I was tired of the questions and the tabloids and the gossiping girls in school. My mother reached across the kitchen table. Touched my cheek. Her hand was cold. She blinked, and it was as if she was looking past me, across the interstate highway, towards the nothingness of the ocean. He must have been watching us. Another almost-truth, I think, but I do not know.

Apparently, on the day of my college graduation, my mother had spotted his blurry picture in the newspaper, he had blue eyes—

cobalt, like mine. So I spent most of my adulthood standing in the dim light of my apartment, inspecting that space between my temples in the mirror and watching my pupils expand and contract in my fogging reflection. They were breathing, maybe. I met my future wife at the optometrist. She bought me glasses as a birthday gift because she thought I was nearsighted. They made everything look shiny and blurry and the wire frames scraped the backs of my ears when I wore them, but I put them on when she let me sleep with her for the first time because even though they kept coming loose and sliding down my nosebridge I thought that this might have been the sort of thing my father loved to do for my mother too.

I went back to Santa Cruz to propose to my then-fiancé. We ate at a nearby Italian place and trotted across the sand at sunset, our sandals in our hands and our eyes trained on the sand, the tiny kernels rolling out and around our feet. When the sky reddened with dust, I got down on one knee and looked into my wife’s eyes, those beautiful breathing things. I opened my mouth to speak, and at that exact moment, I could feel my wife’s name sink below the depths of my consciousness, like something was dragging it away from my body. I wonder if the same thing happened to my father. I imagine this is how our family forgets our truths. On the night of our wedding, my once-future-now-now wife peeled herself open for me. I felt everything become a soft, wet darkness. My eyelids swelled over my eyes as I pressed my forehead against her chest, her steaming lungs, her heat. My wife stroked my hair and I wondered if she could feel how I pulsed around her, how I started melting against the smooth incline of her torso. My glasses were starting to fog, and for a brief moment, I wondered if this was the last time I’d see her, with her legs wrapped around my neck and her manicured fingers massaging the base of my skull. I felt the thin band of color around my pupils pull taut, and the motion hurt, actually hurt, like my optic nerve was being twisted and yanked through my skull. Perhaps this is what happened to my father on the day he left, when he slotted himself into the driver’s seat and knelt down in front of my mother like he was requesting union, this time offering his body instead of a ring. The next day, I watched my wife urinate in the toilet. I caught a few glances of myself in the mirror. My eyes were twitching. I wasn’t

wearing my glasses. My wife and I, we kissed in the shower with the plastic pregnancy tester trapped between our thighs. I drank in the heat from the spray and my wife stroked my wet eyelashes and asked me what we should name the kid. We can give him as many names as we want to, I told her. When we stepped out of the shower, our skin glistening pink under the morning light, I bumped into the counter and watched my glasses twirl in the air before shattering on the ground.

My mother passed away six months later. The doctors said it was cancer. But looking at the veins assembled across her whitening face, I imagined the weight of my father’s identity cremating her insides, her immune system kicking into overdrive, her cells multiplying in a desperate attempt to protect our family. I remember standing by her hospital bed the night before her heart died. She reached out for me, her hands covered in tubes and needles. I asked her, one last time, about my father. Why he left us. Why I had his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have known.” By then, the truths had started coming to me. Day by day, my wife’s stomach ballooned into a bubble of hot flesh, and drinking her unbearable heat at night, I was also realizing. I knew I would change, I knew my father had changed, I knew that the stories about my father, the ones swimming inside my mother, were changing at that very moment. I do not believe that my mother is a liar.

When my mother died, he was spotted again in the Caspian Sea. The message was relayed by three fishermen who lived in Turkmenistan. My wife played me the news broadcast on her phone, balancing it on her swollen belly, and I chuckled at the fishermen’s eyebrows, thick and untamed in a way that made the whites around their eyes spill out from their sockets. I wanted to hold my mother’s funeral on the Boardwalk, but the police got involved and said it was a bad omen for tourism if a woman’s ashes were dumped into the sea. My wife and I had no choice but to dig out our old sand toys and bury her remains in our backyard. I stayed up for three nights after that, reading the articles about my father—mockumentaries featur-

ing hundreds of ghostly faces basked in blue light, printing photos and pinning them to cork boards with red yarn and dollar-store thumbtacks. One day, I will learn all the truths. But for now, they trickle in slowly, starting from my eyes and draining down into the base of my spine.

During one of our visits to the Boardwalk, my mother pulled me into a cheap souvenir shop. She pointed to one of those fortune telling machines, the ones that would spit out a yellow ticket with lucky lotto numbers on it. This one was brand-new, the gold paint perfectly untouched. The animatronic inside—the torso of a gypsy wearing a turban—stared over my head, and I remember turning around, staring out at the beach to figure out what he was gawking at, or searching for. I asked her what she was going to do. “Your father and I, we never knew what the future would be like,” she replied, digging out a crumbled dollar bill from her shorts. She slid it in. The two of us took a step back, watching the man inside the machine come to life. His eyes glowed red and the speaker below him croaked “I can see your fortune—come see it too, no?” She kept the yellow slip with her until the day she died. I know, because when my wife and I visited her during the holidays, we would find her curled up in front of the fireplace, worrying the paper between her teeth. Before the cremation, the doctors handed me the slip, which was so worn and wrinkled that when I turned it over to read the writing, the ink was completely rubbed off. I think the fortune said something about apologies, or a happy reunion with a loved one, or how to discover your own truth, because why else would my mother treasure it like her own son—with all the love in the world, knowing it would eventually transform into a stranger before her very eyes?

A few weeks before my wife’s due date, I stopped sleeping. I spent my nights with my calves tangled around my wife’s knees, stroking her throat as she snored. I would bring her pulse close to mine, close my eyes and think about the future. The exact moment when fatherhood would drag me under, and I would take my first breath, my first real one.

In kindergarten, we read Where the Wild Things Are. I imagined my father like one of the horned creatures in the book. I imagined that my mother tamed my father like Max did, by sailing across the ocean and staring into his eyes without blinking. I imagined that my father was the wildest thing of all.

One day my wife will give birth, and then I will realize it was never my father’s decision to leave. Decisions are a privilege and a lie. I guess I will spend my nights following him instead of my mother, wondering when my own child will learn about the things that breathe underneath the water. I will wish I knew what it was like to hold that infantile thing in my arms, to peel back his eyelids with a thumb and forefinger and watch his irises swim away from the white light glaring down at them from the ceiling of the operating room. Perhaps the flesh will have my eyes too. One day I will do exactly as I’m told: nestle between my wife’s legs, press my ear against her stomach, and listen to the humming, drumming echo of the creature awakening inside her—my child, and me.

Boggy

JAMARQUISE HUSTON Look, o’er the fog, Salvation is a slog, Soft, we shall, we will... Scratch and claw With ironclad will, Till sill’s slag sings Its Siren Song. Friendship. Look, o’er the fog, Forgiveness is a slog, Soft, we shall, we will... Scratch and claw With ironclad will, Till sill’s slag sings Its Siren Song. Family. Look, o’er the fog, Forever is a slog, Soft, we shall, we will... Scratch and claw With ironclad will, Till sill’s slag sings Its Siren Song. Romance. The marsh rings With extreme Pangs of pain As it sings A wail that Rhymes. Yet hope springs Eternal. We will be fine, We will be fine.