6 minute read

INFIDELITY WITH THE UNIVERSE

Liv Ding

Believe me when I say that I died on the day of my mother’s wedding (I had not been invited) and when I woke up, I was sprawled on the floor of my childhood bedroom, mere feet from my bed.

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I got to my feet. I ached all over, as if I had just run a marathon while getting bludgeoned by a blunt club. A lavender bruise rested heavily on my chest like a necklace. When I pressed on it, a soft ache shot through my heart.

The house was quiet and laden with expectancy, as if unsure whether the inhabitants of it would come back. I had experienced the feeling once before. I crossed over to my bedroom door. I wanted to leave my bedroom and pass through the foyer into the living room and build Rome out of couch cushions and pillows like I used to do with Dad. I would stack the pillows in pillar-like formations and he would sit in an armchair, heels resting on the ottoman, his eyes flipping up from his book every so often. I told him that once Rome was finished, he could be a senator because he was so well-read. He grunted.

A week later, he was gone and Rome fell to ruin.

For years afterward, I dreamed up ways to bring my father back down our stubby driveway, such as winning the lottery or a Nobel Prize––but none of those things ever happened. On one rainy day, it struck me to fake my death by slipping dramatically on the pavement and hiding ten ketchup packets beneath my shirt, which would break as I hit the ground. My father would surely tear away from the side of his new wife and rush to the hospital to hear my sucking last breath, would he not? And so I slipped, yet no one paid attention to the shuddering wet mass that was me lying on the driveway. They were all too preoccupied indoors with their lives, their families, their sorrow.

After that, I stopped trying. I let each raindrop drum into my skin that my father was never coming home. Why would he return for a sad, limp daughter such as me? And yet, I had only felt loneliness after he went away. Before that, my father was the sun and I glowed in his warmth––and he had left nonetheless, for a wife and a new family that was undoubtedly shinier and better. A hand crushed my heart into fine powder. Life beat onwards.

I had little idea that the second time I slipped, my death would succeed. An opportunity arose. The meanings of my life fused together with silver string, like constellations. I knew, at once, that all my life’s rainy, roiling grievances would, after my death, be assuaged. I was in my childhood bedroom, the hallowed hollow of my old naivete, and I was dead. Surely this meant that I would see a ghost of my father before I passed on to the next stage of death; the world could not be so cruel and make so little sense as to do otherwise.

I wanted answers. I wanted confessions. I wrenched my bedroom door open.

A gust of wind knocked the door off its hinges and suddenly I was stranded at sea. The door floated over pristine blue waves, and I stood on top of it like an experienced surfer.

Getting nearer every second was a white house on stilts, shaded by tall, curving palm trees. It was a beautiful house, engulfed by the beige beach and the bluer-than-ocean sky. I could see kids playing on the shore, and adults sitting in lounge chairs underneath a wide umbrella.

CRACK! The sky clotted with clouds in an instant. The sea turned steely, and rain lashed down on my skin. An enormous wave flung my door vertically––I fell onto my knees and gripped the edges of the door, wondering if dead people could drown, and deciding, after staring into the cold, gray waves, that they very well could.

On the beach, I heard the kids squeal and go: “Rome is falling!” (Simultaneously, I watched a tall lump of sand darken wetly and cascade into nothingness.) I heard the adults say: “Come on, kids, let’s go inside.” I saw the woman take the youngest child by the hand. I saw the man grab the boy by the collar of his soaked shirt. The boy yelled. “Et tu, patre?” By the time they were inside, the waves had pushed me up on the shore.

I dragged my sopping, salty body across the beach and settled beneath the family’s wide beach umbrella. I’ll just wait here until the rain subsides. Underneath it, the sand was white and dry and adhered to my skin until I looked like a sugared pastry.

I sat there. Occasionally, the wind would make the screen door clatter. Blowing sand whispered across the planks of their porch. Eventually, I realized it would never stop raining, so I crawled out from under the umbrella and found the whole family staring at me through their window, father and mother and son and daughter and a skinny white cat, as if they were posing for a photo and my face was the black eye of the camera.

My chest leavened. The man in this family tableau was Dad. My dad. Not the father of the kids who had their red cheeks pressed to the window. If I squinted hard, I could block out the children’s young, wide gazes and focus only on my father’s grooved face; so familiar, so forgotten.

“Dad!”

My father narrowed his eyes. “Who are you? Get off my property!” My bruise throbbed, and a piece of my heart crumbled off like plaster.

“Don’t you remember me? I’m your daughter.”

“Darling, who is that?” The darling sounded as if a piece of the woman’s tongue had been pulled off along with the word. I longed to fold up the beach umbrella and throw it through the window like a javelin, but instead, I cut my father with words.

“Is that your wife? Is that the woman you had an affair with?”

“Affair?” The woman puckered up her lips. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus; copper tendrils of hair framed her face and her lashless eyes. The depths of her eyes were extraordinary. It was as if she stared straight through you into the center of the Earth.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

Her eyes became molten cores. “Why do you want to know?”

So that my anger can take form and become a person. So that it can grab you by the shoulders and shake you and say, “You are the sole reason for my suffering!”

My voice echoed across the beach. I felt my open mouth and shut it. Had I really said all that? It was as if the confession had been prised out of the center of my chest. How did this woman unlock the well-hidden house of my depravity?

No one had the key, especially not my father; he would not choose to come home if his daughter jutted her chin out toward him in high dudgeon. Was her plan to expose my scorching flaws in order to repulse him to me? Fear contracted the muscles of my cheeks as I saw the disapproval etched into his face.

There’s something about that woman. Something about her night-sky eyes. Was this why my father eventually moved away? Was it because she had pulled every secret of his from his larynx until eventually he felt he had an obligation to her?

It’s not Dad’s fault he had an affair. He was forced to cheat. Otherwise, why would he leave us? We were perfect, weren’t we? Before he left. There was a stunned silence after these sentences flew from between my teeth, writhing in the air like a spirit that had been exorcized from my ribs.

Then, I felt pain seize my face. When the metallic blurriness subsided, my mother was raining from her eyes. Her eyes were the brown of wet sand and softly lashed. I saw in them a stolen hairpin sliding into a lock, opening her consciousness to unpleasant truths––that her daughter had never really been on her side.

I left her house, having been purged from it with my mother’s thick tears. It didn't matter, I thought, as my eyes lingered for a last time on the living room, pillows neatly arranged in the grooves of the armchairs. Rome had fallen long ago, and I had only been living in its carcass.

A week later, I slipped down the stairs and died.

No one mourned my death. Not my father. Not my mother. Not the ghosts that I thought roamed the empty streets of Rome. Not even the universe had tensed as one of its life forms gave way; I had been on the wrong side all along. I glanced up once again at the windows of the beach house. The family was gone. My father and the universe and their two children and the white cat.

Gone.

Orphaned, I walked over to the wet, misshapen sand pile where a Pantheon once stood. The waves lapped noisily against the shore. I saw my fractured bedroom door half-buried in the sand, rocking with each ebb and flow of the waves. I remembered how it had ridden over the glassy blue crests

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