Love Is Sweeter, fiction by HC Hsu

also by hc hsu

Essays Middle of the Night, Deerbrook Editions, 2015 Translation Yu Jie, Steel Gate to Freedom: The Life of Liu Xiaobo, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015

Love Is Sweeter HC Hsu

DE E RBRO OK E DI T ION S

published by

Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, Maine 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions Š 2020 by HC Hsu All rights reserved ISBN: 978-0-9600293-3-4 Cover and Book Design by Jeffrey Haste Cover Photograph by Zhu Difeng/Shutterstock.com Interior Photographs by Erik Felthauser

Contents Part 1. Tree, Leaves, and Other Things Eric 9 Tree 13 Gabe 21 Virgil 27 Azure 37 Aki 43 Adam 51 Kevin 59 Noah 65 Chad 70 Rene 75 I, Claudius

83

Part 2. Love Is Sweeter And Then

91

As If 111 For Now 126 Of Course 136 What Else 148 All in All 167

Part 1 Tree, Leaves, and Other Things

Eric In the sunset without a sun, the sky looked like a large, flat piece of white, opaque paper.

He looked at this canvas, so even, homogeneous, seemingly without edges. It extended beyond the small, continuous hills, which were black.

There were some houses on the hills, but they had fused into one with the mountain, disappeared under the shadow, into the blackness.

The water was the reflection of the sky, in the same dull whitish gray; there were a few small black fish swimming in it, making little ripples around him. He stood still, with his thighs half-submerged.

Because of the recent, unusual rain, the lake rose. A few feet from the gray sand banks, the water used to come up to his heels. Now even the metal railing was almost all underneath.

Everything was either sinking, or resurfacing. The city of Atlantis.

Soon it became completely dark, and he got out. * He didn’t know how he got out of the hospital that day.

He just remembered making turn after turn—it was a labyrinth, every double door was the same, clean white, as every other double door, he pushed through one, and couldn’t tell if he had just come from the other side, the same hallway down either direction. The gates were still flapping by each other.

It wasn’t easy.

9

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

What was truly strange was he couldn’t recall anything after that, as if he had very selective amnesia, how he got home, or anything that happened later that day, vague impressions.

Lately, he had found himself zoning out more and more often, forget what he was doing. At work, in stores buying things, crossing the street. He thought he was losing it.

He would have walked right in front of and gotten run over by a speeding moped once, had he not just heard a little dog barking behind him, making him stop and turn around. It was a stray dog, brown, slender. The dog sat on the sidewalk and looked at him, next to a bunch of luggage and suitcases, he didn’t know whom they belonged to. Its eyes flickered and glowed. Just this he remembered very clearly.

He never saw the dog again, there, or anywhere. There were too many stray dogs in the city. * The doctor told him.

How long would he have, he asked him.

Four weeks. A month. At most.

Then he walked out of the hospital.

That was it.

He didn’t tell anyone. The doctors gave him a lot of phone numbers, pamphlets, cards, and told him a lot of things he should, or needed to, do, to ’prepare.’ He didn’t want to do anything.

Lately he had gone swimming often in the community pool in the park. The pool water was oddly blue, yet clear, one could see straight through to the floor bottom. He liked to swim to the deep end, then prop himself up on the protruding edge, with the back of his elbows; his legs couldn’t kick to the ground. The water was so blue it looked almost poisonous.

The large pool was full of people. Kids laughing and yelling, and quieter, were adults talking, forming a loose net of murmurs, one pierced occasionally by a kid’s high shriek.

A mermaid slipped by under his feet. A black shadow. 3:05 pm, he looked at his watch. ’It’s raining,’ he heard someone near him say. Not to him.

He looked up. Nothing. ’It’s raining.’ It’s raining, he heard more and more echoes.

10

er ic

He looked up again, squinting.

The sun was really bright. People were getting out of the water in droves. He felt it was a little funny.

He turned his palms up, trying to feel any rain. He began to see in front of him, very small ripples, appearing, one, another, more and more, until all the ripples had expanded into each other.

It suddenly began pouring. The rain kept rolling down his face, people screaming, laughing. Suddenly he found it a little hard to breathe.

Instinctively he pushed himself forward, away from the edge, sinking into the water.

That was where he met Aki. * The city at night glowed. The streets were empty, though, the climate suddenly cooling.

He was warm sitting in the subway train, slowly, coming to a stop. All the different colored signs down every street were lit, stacked on top of one another in any which way and orientation, like in that video game. But he couldn’t see anybody.

What people had built, gloriously, went on with or without them. He pressed his hand on the train window; there was another, outer layer of glass, but his hand still felt cold.

The train reached the stop.

He walked along the edge of the platform. There were still not that many people. The weather really changed at a moment’s notice. Eric remembered that afternoon he met Aki, in a humid high-seventies.

She asked him, aren’t you getting out of the pool?

Oh, he said. He lifted himself out of the water, and sat on the edge.

Aki! I got the towels! A little boy yelled from the other end of the pool. He remembered her name.

Eric looked at her, and noticed her eyes weren’t on him. He was embarrassed right away. The girl named Aki was talking to someone else.

He got out of the water completely, stood up, and was about to leave; but he couldn’t help looking in her direction once again. Her body turned a little bit toward him, with her hands 11

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

extended out, palms facing upward. She wasn’t looking at him, but through him. He saw her eyes were wide open, the black and the white clearly distinct, almost pure crystalline, glinting. Water rolled past her cheeks, like tears, but her face was completely expressionless, as if she had been crying, after a long while, having released already every feeling and emotion she possibly could, with there being nothing left now, but complete calmness, serene. But the tears hadn’t been wiped away.

He thought of the stray dog.

He forgot how long he stood there watching her. But he recalled the rain seemed to have sometime stopped. * It began drizzling. He walked faster.

There was a shop in view in front of him. A big golden neon sign La Villa, with diffuse incandescent light, emanating from inside the large single-pane glass storefront, in warm and vivid contrast to the subway train station next to it.

A man and a woman sat across from each other by the window. Couldn’t tell what the man was saying, his facial expression was deadpan; the woman kept laughing, and laughing, hardly being able to contain herself. Tears were brimming from her eyes, making them sparkle; she was wiping them away with her fingers.

He was outside, so he couldn’t hear them.

The coffee shop was almost full, there was someone at every table, students and their laptops, single women, middle-aged men in suits, families, couples. The entire city was found in there, again.

He and Aki were the couple by the window. He couldn’t forget how her eyes looked that afternoon.

He stood, at the lake, watching the invisible sun fall behind over the hills.

When the skies completely darkened, this would be his first memory.

12

Tree In the wild there is a dead fawn Wrapped in white speargrass The Book of Poetry

Stop. * He heard.

Stop.

It was his own voice.

13

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

He slammed on the brakes. His body lunged forward, and remained in a leaning position. For an instant. Then, it jolted back, hitting the leather seat, with a muffled slap. The quickness, almost simultaneity, with which this chain of action unfurled created in him a momentary illusion that his soul had been yanked out of him.

The vehicle stopped.

With his hands still on the steering wheel, he fixed his gaze on the truck hood, beyond the windshield. The bright autumn morning sunlight shone, and reflected on the smooth, deep blue metallic surface in a luminous straight white line down the middle, perpendicular to the windshield, leading to a small silver, upside-down triangle composed of four smaller triangles affixed to the very front tip of the hood, flashing, shimmering.

It made him squint. He shifted his gaze, to the dark mound, just in front of the truck and a few inches below the ornament in his line of sight. The large mass appeared simply as an irregular black shape amidst the brightness that suffused the surroundings.

He cut the ignition, pushed the car door open, and stepped into the light. * [Essex, Bluff Point, intersection of Cold Spring and Barksdale, 44.159, -73.415 approximate, unknown.]

* Tree. What a funny name.

[Lewis, 5048 Mud Lake, 43.472, -75.513 approximate, deer.]

Tree was tall and lanky, with long arms and long legs, a bit bony in places, but still rather handsome.

[Minerva, Stillwater, 648, Thirty-two, 42.596, -73.382, snake.]

In contrast to his body, his face possessed a more delicate, feminine quality: short, curly cherub-like hair the color of raw 14

tree

hazelnuts, fine brows and narrow eyes that tapered up toward just above the temples, a straight but small nose, and thin, pale pink lips barely a shade ruddier than the skin around them, with a dark pin-sized mole above the left corner, reminiscent of a certain Hollywood star from a bygone era.

[Essex, Station and Elm, 44.373, -73.405 approximate, raccoon/unknown.} He had an intense gaze that would not be diminished by the small frame of his face, or lost in the height of his overall stature—a gaze, a ray, that was focused through the narrow slits of his eyes, that seemed to want nothing but to reduce the world to rubble, to flatten everything into one surface, to a single line, and set fire to that horizon.

[Keene, Glenmore, County Road 13, coordinates unknown, unknown.]

But the truth wasn’t like that. Most often, he didn’t feel anger, or resentment, or contempt, or interest, or passion, or really anything in particular. Usually, he wasn’t thinking about anything, and in general he held no stalwart ideas or opinions of things or people. There was neither algebra nor fire, neither crystal nor flame, behind his gaze; there was a mere brown wilderness, interspersed with some green, under a sky like a large, flat piece of white, opaque paper, and the rustling of the wind.

He was born in August 1969, and his parents named him Tree. But one could say also he named himself. He never really liked his name, not because of the name itself, but because of the reactions to it—from teasing when he was little, to a kind of curiosity and inquisitiveness after he became an adult. It brought him attention, before people even met him. They expected some sort of summary, some interesting and insightful bon mot, an explanation, as if he were a line in a poem, a walking, breathing text with a title over his head, behind his parents, family, even an entire generation—where, just as with his gaze, there was none. If he were a tree, he would be a ficus or banyan tree, sending his roots flying straight up into the sky. Tree had a choice, but he never changed his name.

15

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

* Unknown. Unknown. Unknown. * The voice coming from the radio was a woman’s. It was a medium voice, even, enunciated, but not too much so, neither loud nor soft, making it difficult to imagine what she looked like. Somebody at central dispatch. A silhouette, with a few characteristics to denote gender as on a public sign. A shadow of some woman, perhaps. That’s all. Each time the voice came though, it was accompanied by an outburst of static, crackling, burning, parching the words, and turning them into ashes. He was reminded of a photo he’d seen a few times, the shadow of the woman who had been sitting on the stone steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima and waiting for the bank to open for business, and then incinerated in an instant.

Leaving nothing behind.

Tree reached for and popped open the glove compartment and got out a large white candle. A strong waft of vanilla scent escaped the glove box as soon as he opened it, and quickly filled the inside of the truck, thickening the air. He turned the hand crank to roll down the window on the passenger side, and then sat back up and rolled down the window on his side.

He looked at the dark mound just in front of his truck. The large mass appeared simply as an irregular black shape amidst the brightness suffusing the surroundings. He turned off the engine, opened the car door, and walked into the light. * [43.472. -75.513.]

The deer’s head was detached from its body.

More precisely, there was simply nothing above the neckline. The head was not there anymore, and had vanished.

The wound itself was exceptionally clean, an almost straight line, as if somebody had removed simply a piece from a puzzle, or couldn’t find the right piece to finish it, 16

tree

and just abandoned it, in the middle of nowhere.

The gravel where its head should be appeared darker, as if it were wet, in the shape of an uneven, childishly drawn circle, a few shades of gray deeper than the areas around it. From directly above, it looked like a thought or speech bubble coming out and expanding gradually from the throat opening itself.

The flesh around the opening, in light pink and salmon, encircled by a ring of short, white and chestnut brown fur, had contracted and involved into a rosebud-like, somewhat crusty maroon-colored center. Beyond it, was a quite plump body, covered in soft brown fur, its legs all crisscrossed, with a large, distended white belly. Something appeared to strike against the belly, from the inside, causing the skin and muscle to ripple and wave somewhat.

High above, a faint and distant sound of wings flapping, circled, and circled. * [Keene, Glenmore, County Road 13, coordinates unknown, unknown.] * That was where he saw her.

A deep maroon red, probably 80s-model, small Volvo, with its blinkers on, illuminating the mist, was parked near the side of the tree-lined road, about ten feet away from a telephone pole. Its lights were off.

It was the beginning of September, and the day was overcast, humid and foggy. Tree pulled up his truck slowly next to the car to see if everyone was all right.

He didn’t know why, but for some reason he automatically assumed there was more than one person in the car, perhaps a family. But when he pulled up, he saw only a woman.

He had rolled down his passenger side window, and her window was also down, so he could see her relatively clearly.

At least her face.

It was a beautiful, almost angelic face. Oval, with near-translucent skin and just a flush of red seeping through her cheeks, like a bloom of watercolor across a sheet of thin pulp paper; 17

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

long, somewhat wild dark grayish brown hair parted near the center falling past her chest; dark, angular, masculine brows, giving her a slight, unintentionally indignant, hard-lined expression that would have bordered on cruel had it not been soothed and placated by her large, soft, doe-like eyes, short nose, and full, luscious, carmine-red lips.

Maybe it was the mist, but he thought she looked like she had been crying.

Tree was slightly in front of her. She was simply staring straight ahead. Not at him. His eyes followed hers, to her windshield. There was a brilliant red splat in the center of the glass, and a few red trickles were slowly dripping down to the wipers and drain opening. It was as if something collided with the car in midair, and then vanished. The blood was so unusually and eerily bright, it made everything else seem black and white. It alone was present, this esoteric blot, this stain. Everything else receded into mere memory. Like a sign of some sort, left in the sand, whose referent had receded with the tides, like time moving simultaneously forward and backward, into at once a vast past, and an unfathomable future, now between him and her.

He imagined that something, that unknown creature, as it burst against the transparent glass, in the moment of impact, imagining it as it was happening frame by frame: hitting, the masses of muscles shifting, rupturing, unfurling, unfolding, flattening. The ecstasy of opening up oneself to the void, of becoming nothing but pure surface, of emptying the body of all its content. Like a modernist painting, that was at once the work, and the exhibit. The artist would become superfluous and, in his final act with the final stroke, would erase himself and disappear.

Leaving nothing behind. Except the bright red mark of pure pleasure; he could hear its screams of insuppressible joy and merriment.

[Crown Point, Cold Spring, intersection at County 7, 43.949, -73.418, dog.]

The voice came through, and jolted him out of his imagination. He looked over at the woman again, and wanted to say something, but before he could open his mouth, he heard a 18

tree

loud revving noise, followed by a sharp, dry screech. Before he could process what had happened, he saw the Volvo speeding away.

Already it was at a distance.

It disappeared around the bend.

A few seconds later, the road was silent again. * He’d been having the same dream a couple of nights in a row.

He looked at the dark mound, just in front of his truck below the triangular ornament. The large mass appeared simply as an irregular black shape.

It was night.

He turned off his truck but left the lights on, opened the door, and stepped out in front of the headlights. He was in a desert.

In the sand was a headless human body. A woman. The body had decomposed.

He knew it was her.

He woke up to rain tapping on the windows. * Autumn sunlight poured in through the floor-length windows of the storefront, turning the interior golden. Tree stared at the unused metal spoon, reflecting the light as flashes, shimmers, of white, on the concave side, on top of a folded white paper napkin with a pressed lace pattern along its bottom edge.

He had just finished breakfast. For some reason, maybe it was the light, he suddenly thought of her.

Some memory from dozens of years ago. The mist, the telephone pole, the blood stain. The large, glimmering eyes. The sound of the car driving away. It all came flooding back to him.

This would happen once in a while. Without warning. And just for a moment, after, he would feel empty, like he just awoke from a long-forgotten, childhood dream.

Maybe it wasn’t really so misty.

He woke up.

19

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

The bells jangled with the opening creak of the door, and then quickly rang again as the door slammed shut.

Tree got up, pushed the door open, and walked out into the light. * Stop.

Tree was on the same road.

He had wanted to come back, ever since his dream.

He didn’t know why. But Tree was Tree; he didn’t need a reason.

Even though it wasn’t exactly the same spot. Nothing could be exactly the same, all the time.

The squirrel on the ground had been completely flattened, probably by countless cars having driven over it. The body was parched and gray, with no real distinguishing features except a general shape, resembling more an old, threadbare, tattered, dirty dried-up rag, disintegrating, becoming, gradually, merely one more layer of dust, of grime, mixed in with the gravel and, eventually, the road itself.

Tree tried to scrape it off with his metal bench scraper, to no avail. The squirrel remained stuck as if it had grown straight out of the ground, out of the earth itself. He sighed, and wrapped the tip of the scraper in the black plastic trash bag he had in his other hand, and wiped the scraper off inside the bag.

He took the scraper back out, tied up the bag, and just as he was about to toss them both in the back of the truck near the crane, he saw a pair of deer, a large one and a small one, about ten feet in front of his truck, standing still, side by side. In the middle of the road.

A doe and a fawn.

Out from the wilderness, the animals watched him in solemn silence.

20

Gabe Song watched the lift as it raised itself, lowered itself, then raised itself again. There was no one standing on the platform.

The machine, about three feet directly in front of her, was moving by itself, slowly, steadily, in a simple, repetitive motion, up, and down, each time accompanied by the sound of an electric motor as it moved.

It was as if Song had been hypnotized by this repetitive movement and rhythmic whirling—there was something comforting, and familiar, to the mechanics, like the inhale-exhale of the lungs, or the lull of a beating heart. She put her pen down.

It reminded her also of something else.

Sometime the air conditioning had stopped, and the library became hollowly silent, except for the soft motor of the lift, 21

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

which became more distinct, like a thread, thin, transparent, vibrating through light and air, traversing stacks upon stacks, page after page. ’Sorry.’

A loud and pronounced whisper from behind startled her, and pulled Song out of her lull.

She looked back, and saw a picture. Dangling, a miniature photograph, of a head on a sky blue background. A shorthaired, miniature man’s head, swaying left and right. Underneath it was printed GABE A. The tip of Song’s nose was only a few inches from the hanging, undulating mini-head. She pulled back almost instantly, and with her eyes followed two light purple braided lanyards attached to the plastic sleeve around the photograph up to a man’s face. A bigger version of the face in the picture, magnified 50 times—brown, cropped hair, thick eyebrows, big, fawnlike brown eyes, a wide nose and slightly crooked, pale, almost bordering on steel-blue, lips—all on a translucent, almost gleamingly white, large square face. It was an adolescent face, perhaps mid- to late teens. It had a blankness and openness about it, like a new canvas, or simply a piece of white paper, without a stain, smudge, or shadow.

Song looked into his eyes, which were plainly and directly looking back into hers, and instinctively lowered her head again, to the photograph, and smiled slightly, as her eyes caught the letters on the nametag again. GABE. A. The boy walked over to the lift as it was ascending, reached his arm up and over the side railing, and fumbled his hand around for the switch, his arm stretching higher and higher as the machine took it along more and more upward. Finally he flicked the switch, and the motor stopped. For a second, it was silent, and nothing moved. ’Awwww, man…’ the boy whined loudly, piercing through the solidified moment, and flicked on the switch again. The platform began to descend in a mechanical whirl, the air conditioner started humming, and everything was liquid once more.

Song watched him from behind, and smiled.

This would be the third time she had smiled at him in the library in the past month.

She had been coming to the library ever since she was go22

gabe

ing to school here. It became a habit, after she graduated and found work in the city as a translator.

The first time she saw Gabe was a month ago. She saw only the back of him: his thin, wiry arms flexed, sleeves folded up neatly to the elbows, his back stretching and wiggling the worm-like creases in his white shirt. Unfortunately vandalism was common in the area, and someone had spray-painted in bright neon pink ’FAG’ on one of the three side windows facing the street. Song could see it from afar as she was walking toward the building from the nearby train shelter. The letters shone brilliantly under the morning sun, and the irradiated color itself emanated a feeling of insuppressible joy and merriment.

Next to his feet was a rectangular bucket filled with orange, old-yolk-colored water. As he bent down each time and reached a gray, tatty-looking terrycloth towel that’s balled up in his hand into the bucket, the back of his clean white shirt became more and more untucked from his pants. For some reason Song found this sight to be incongruously humorous, and smiled, pitying the guy. She walked toward the front entrance, deciding to think nothing more of it, passing him.

It was then that she heard a voice, a loud and pronounced whisper, spoken from right next to her, with regularity. Like a mantra, repeating a word:

Fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag,…

The voice was coming from him.

It piqued her curiosity.

Or rather, he did.

A week and a half later, she went back to the library, and looked for him.

Song didn’t know his name, or even what he looked like.

She only caught a vague glimpse of his profile as she passed by him last time through the glass door into the building. She turned around once she was inside. His face and the upper half of his body were obstructed by the large and lurid painted letters, inverted and now looking more like aestheticized, abstract ciphers, some kind of gang code, secretly subversive, behind the other side of the glass. She couldn’t make out his face.

When she came back out later, he was gone.

Since then, for some reason, she couldn’t get the man, and 23

t r e e s , l e av e s , a n d o t h e r t h i n g s

his voice, the word, out of her head, like the sound of marching boots, to a drill order. Over and over.

When she was still in school, she had a crush on a boy in her English class. She never talked to him. There was always a chorus of girls surrounding him. The boy had very delicate features, with a pair of big, clear, moss green eyes, and a floating, melodious voice that made every sentence he spoke sound like at once a long sigh and a peal of laughter. Song always sat two rows behind him. There were hundreds of people in the class; she never thought he noticed her.

Song remembered once at night after one of her classes when she cut through the school parking lot in a hurry to catch the last bus, at the stop across the main street, of all people, she ran into the boy. ’Hello.’ She waved as she quickly walked by him.

The boy turned. His face was ghostly ashen under the fluorescent glow of the street lamps. Her first thought was he looked like someone who had just drowned. He turned, saw her, then simply turned back. Saying nothing. Song automatically followed the line of his sight: he was looking at a dark navy blue car. The driver’s side mirror was on the ground, and the car window was completely shattered, onto the seat, the floor and the dashboard, inside, like a shower of star shimmer, twinkling under the white aquarium-like light. On the car hood, was sprayed the word FAG in white. She noticed, he was trembling. A year later, she heard, while he was visiting his parents back home for the summer, they found him in the guest bath, having locked himself in, and drowned himself in the double tub.

Seeing the graffiti reminded her of that boy.

The second time she saw Gabe was in the checkout line. A man was changing the bottle on a water cooler next to the line.

At first Song didn’t recognize him; then she saw and remembered the clean white shirt with the sleeves folded up neatly to the elbows, his arms and back wiggling and stretching the creases across the fabric, becoming more and more wrinkly and untucked from his light-colored khaki pants.

His backside, again.

For one reason or another Song really, truly wanted to see what he looked like, again, this time clearly, face-on. It was hard to say exactly what she was curious about. Perhaps she 24

gabe

wanted to simply fill out, to complete, that vague image that had been in her mind from only the quick, partial glimpse she was able to catch, that shrapnel of a fragment of a profile, as she passed the glass door that first time. Or perhaps, she wanted to match a face to the voice that spoke to her, to give a present, visible reality to some echoing memory. In any case, something in him awoke something in her; when she tried to think what that something was, she could only, she was surprised, find one word: sadness.

Perhaps he knew why.

In that moment she thought of all the ways she could make him turn, but she stood there. The line suddenly moved forward, and as she quickly took a few steps ahead, he turned and faced her head-on.

Almost by instinct, she immediately let slip a: ’Hello.’ He smiled. Big, brown eyes, a flat, wide nose, and plain, open, completely guileless and warm-bracing smile, that is slightly crooked upward to the right. In the natural sunlight that poured in through the glass windows, it struck her how gleaming, and pellucid, his skin was. Probably a boy of no more than twenty.

She watched the boy, saw him, slowly, lift his thin arm up, to his face, palm open, and wave. Then, turning his hand around to his face, he inserted his index finger, into his right nostril.

Finally, she understood.

Song gently waved back.

And smiled.

25