Maximilian Du
Malavika Kannan
Grace Carroll
Katherine E. Woo
Jisoo Hope Yoon
Poolside, Marni sat back on her haunches and teased a dried scale on the Telecue with a chipped nail. The cable of the Telecue snaked between her feet, through the puddles of saltwater left by the whales, and into the trainer’s control unit, which turned the button presses into underwater sounds. Every sound corresponded to a trained behavior. During showtime, the whales knew to listen at the speaker. They’d crowd around the little hole, waiting for their assignments as they came through digitally-clipped squeaks.
The drumbeats started, and Marni stood up. The sun was warm against the thick layers of her wetsuit. She could feel it most between her shoulder blades, where her muscles hurt the most. Nearly every stadium seat was filled this afternoon. The children were up in front, ponchos trampled under their feet. The adults sat further up in the stadium, under the sunshade with their two-buck mimosas and a scattering of digital cameras.
From behind came the clank of a bolt-lock as the main pool gates swung open. A black shadow slipped through the gates, pushing a bulge of water that spewed over the tank lip. Marni saw a flash of white as the animal rolled towards her. From the freckles on the belly and the stretch of the white near the eye, Marni knew that it was certainly Anda, the matriarch of the whales here.
Without looking down, Marni pressed D4 on the Telecue. A long tone sounded from underwater. Anda stiffened, and she dove swiftly until only her tail was visible from ground level.
Wiping the fog off the quartz panes of the tank, Marni counted the fluke strokes of Anda. It took two strokes to slow down, one to turn around, and seven powerful pounds to travel the thirty-five feet to the surface, where Anda’s whole body came out of the water, as rigid as a javelin.
There was a moment, right at the peak of Anda’s jump, where the whale hung motionless, so it seemed, and the water sloughing off her body gleamed like icicles. The light came from everywhere, the sky, the water, and Marni could almost forget about the growling flatbed trucks already waiting backstage, filled with tie-downs and an empty sling.
After Koko’s death, the team voted supervisor Marni for leading the noontime show. She was the one who had dealt with whale death before, they said. She was the one who could go on stage and speak to the crowd in her usual lilting way.
Anda came down in a tremendous splash, and the water spilled a thick, clear sheet
over the tank wall, crashing into Marni. It pounded against her face, and when she gasped for breath, she tasted the salt. Deep salt.
Marni realized that she hadn’t spoken a singular word throughout the whole show. Much was prerecorded anyways: the conservation messages, the tropical music. For the past twenty minutes, Marni was focused on the Telecue. She pressed button after button, and the whales came out in practiced sequence. The team did their rides on the whales, although Marni didn’t cue any of the better acrobatics that required a focused mind.
Late that afternoon, the crane arrived through the access road that Animal Care typically used for fish delivery. The crane truck was thickly built, with four wheels on each side. Researchers from a nearby lab had come to supervise the extraction process, as they wanted to preserve some factor of anatomical stability that Marni didn’t really understand. The head vet had come from his office to watch. Even the park lawyer was here, although Marni thought it was more out of morbid curiosity, as very little could be gained from an attorney watching the body of an animal being loaded onto a flatbed truck.
The fish house opened, and Roxy stepped out, into the crowd of people by the medical pool. They were fastening the canvas sling to the hook of the crane, which was dipping lazily into the water. Marni was standing at an adjacent pool, where three whales were swimming.
Roxy touched Marni’s shoulder. She looked, and turned back to the commotion with the truck and the people, but she knew that Roxy would stay right there. She had been Marni’s mentee for all of Roxy’s two years here as an associate trainer.
Marni pointed to the one head poking out the water. “See Anda? She’s swimming stiff.” She kept looking at the whale, who bobbed her head, sending ripples in the pool.
“If my dead first daughter was in a sling right now, I’d be swimming stiff too.”
“Wait ‘till you’re a mother,” said Marni. For a frightening moment she pictured her son, swaddled in a sling. “It gets worse.”
They were quiet for a moment, and then Marni heard Anda’s moan. The moan was low and watery and almost metallic sounding, as if ported through a steel pipe. Marni had heard Anda cry like this before. It had always been a sound of desire. She moaned for a half-barrel toy laying just out of her reach, a spray from the garden hose, a thick hunk of gelatin.
Roxy shook her head. “Haunting.”
From behind came the whine of the hydraulic winch and the rise of voices giving instructions. There came a sound of dripping, and Marni turned around to see the rising of a sling with a limp flipper poking out from both sides.
“Roxy—” she said, and stopped, fixated on the moving sling. The workers pulled the truck into position, and the crane lowered its load onto the metal slats. “Roxy, I’ve seen this three times and it doesn’t get better.”
Roxy slung her arms around Marni and pulled her close and tight. Marni could feel the muscles on her body, the rise and fall of her chest, even the tapping of a slow, athletic heart in her neck. There was a quiver in her body, and Marni knew, from the times that she had held her in this exact same way, that this was the closest Roxy got to crying.
At 3:30 the next morning, Marni’s cellphone rang. She had tried calling Roxy last night to check in, but it went to voicemail and she fell asleep with the phone on full ringer next to her face. Her husband Mark woke first, and he gently shook Marni until she sat up. She stared at the number on the phone, not understanding the string of numbers.
“Ugh, fuck off,” she said to the glowing screen.
Mark looked over her shoulder. “Marn,” he said. “That’s the police department.”
“Shit,” she said. She remembered the time, years ago, when a few punkers pried open the gate of whale stadium to steal the two large video cameras they used during the shows.
She accepted the call and put it on speaker. “Hello?” she said, and there was a long pause.
“Marina.”
Marni thought the voice sounded hoarse. “Yes, I’m here,” she said. “Marina, this is Sergeant Horwitz. We need you to come to whale stadium right now.”
“Now?”
“Yes, right now.”
She wanted to ask if this could wait until morning. All of her arm and leg muscles were hurting, and as she gained consciousness, the thought of Koko rose, and then her mom Anda. But the Sergeant seemed non-negotiable, and she just hung up the phone. Marni took the HOV lane to the park. It was so early in the morning that everything felt legal.
After changing into her wetsuit, Marni walked across the games area of the park to
the little entrance for the backstage of whale stadium. In front of the door stood a man with a flashlight. For a second Marni thought it was the night watchman, but she saw the gleam of his badge in the moonlight and the massive cowboy hat that hid his face in shadow.
“Marina?” he asked when Marni got close enough.
Marni nodded. “What’s going on?”
Instead of answering, Sergeant Horwitz opened the door.
Marni walked into the corridor, which was painted blue to match the show theme, even though nobody could see this part of backstage. Along the walls, racks of theatrical wetsuits were still drying from last night’s show. Their drips left dark puddles on the concrete, and some of them were turned inside-out. The night lights left a soft glow on the ground and corridor. They got fainter as they approached the pools, the Sergeant in the front, sweeping the ground with his brilliant torch, and Marni trailed in the back.
There had been times when Marni drove home from work and saw a police officer pressing a handcuffed man to the hood of a car, and as the scene rushed behind her, she felt an urge to stay and stare. These officers seemed like men who leaned too heavily on their shiny guns and tasers. It was a sense of control that nearly every whale trainer experienced on the first few days on the job. Wave a finger, and a whale jumped for you. The buttons on the Telecue made the animals feel like machines. The whales could sense that, she knew. When Roxy went through that phase, she tried requesting three hard behaviors on Koko. She waited until Roxy was right in front of her, and then she regurgitated a couple gallons of half-dissolved fish onto her chest.
Right before they got to the pool, Horwitz turned around. He was a head taller than Marni, and broad. If he took of his hat and slipped into a wetsuit, he could pass easily as a head trainer.
“Can you move an animal?” he asked.
“You don’t move an animal,” said Marni, folding her arms. “The animal moves itself. You can ask it nicely to move.”
Horwitz cleared his throat. “My wife and I love your shows. But I’m not here for the fluff about positive reinforcement,” he said. He pointed to the darkness outside the corridor. “There’s a whale in the larger pool. Can you move it?”
“To where?” Marni visualized the sleeping charts from last night, and she remembered giving the largest pool to Anda.
“Just get it out of that pool.”
“Why?”
A twitch went through the Horwitz’s face, distorting a scar that ran along his
cheek. It was a decision process, thought Marni. There were times after a behavior had been requested, when the animals rolled sideways until one of their eyes could perceive the requester. In that pause came a silent conflict resolution. After two seconds, the whale would decide how they would fulfill the request, if at all.
“There is a deceased person at the bottom of that pool,” he said, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “Your watchman called dispatch when he saw the body on his rounds.”
There was supposed to be a protocol for monitoring the pool constantly at night, and a protocol for recovery that didn’t require a sheriff. But Jacques—Marni only knew him from the whale team retreat at Applebee’s—was fresh out of college, with dreams of vet school.
Marni thought at once to the conical teeth inside Anda’s mouth, how she could press them down with enough force to warp metal bars. Killer whales had torturous hunting techniques in the wild, but they were remarkably docile around humans. When asked why, a trainer was supposed to say, “I don’t know.”
At the sight of her old trainer—or perhaps the sound—Anda pushed her body halfway into the air, like she always did in the mornings for Marni. It was recorded in the trainer’s handbook as one of Anda’s key traits.
The whale put her head on the pool edge, as close to Marni as she could. On the ground was a few long poles used for target training. This pool was used as a teaching pool for the whales. Marni and the team called it the Classroom. There were drainage grates for excess water, and coolers that could be filled with fish during a training session.
Marni wrapped her arms around the taper of Anda’s jaws and squeezed as hard as she could, the way that Anda liked her hugs. She stood there for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. Sergeant Horwitz pulled out a digital camera and pointed at a fish cooler with a lid that had fallen to the ground. The flash lit up the whole pool deck in an eerie white, and for the briefest of moments, Marni saw the whale’s shadow stretch long across the concrete. The light left a burst of color in her eyes, and the whale made a sound like a question.
“The man’s taking some pictures,” she said to Anda in a falsetto that she used around the animals. “We like our pictures, don’t we Sergeant?”
Horwitz stared at Marni, the camera tight in his hands. “No flippin’ way,” he said. “No flippin’ way did you ladies get a whale to understand English.”
“We didn’t.”
The corners of Horwitz’s mouth curled into a smile. “Crazy people.” He went back to the camera.
Rolled close to the pool were two MediLights that Marni couldn’t remember bringing out. Their battery bases tapered into long fiberglass poles, which ended in a cluster of lights pointed at the water. The lights were off, and by the red blinking indicator on the batteries, Marni knew that they had drained.
Only the top few inches of the water caught the low moon in the sky, casting silver puddles across the surface. The water tapped against the pool walls and the drainage grate with a slow, slapping sound. Deeper down, the water faded completely to darkness, giving an appearance of infinite depth.
Marni went to the electrical panel at the far end of the Classroom. She activated the in-pool and deck lights. Instantly, the whole backstage became flushed in color. In the moonlight, she had only been seeing monochrome. Now, the familiar blueness of the buildings came back.
As she looked back over the edge of the pool, Marni saw a distorted shadow on the bottom. There was very little else she could make out. It could have easily been a large toy, an old wetsuit, a clump of whale shit.
Anda rose from a dive, and she rested her chin in front of Marni again. She opened Anda’s mouth and patted her tongue. There were strips of neoprene hanging like ribbons from some of her teeth. They were blue and pink. She was about to ask the whale about what these were, but the Sergeant brushed behind her, still clicking his camera at various pieces of equipment, and Marni kept quiet.
Marni’s son was going through a phase where he’d draw messy spirals on pieces of butcher paper and explain how this one was a giraffe, and this one was robot. He spoke with such confidence in his craft, but to Marni, they were both spirals. She didn’t know who was wrong. Maybe the spirals had, tucked into their many twirls, the eyes and neck and patches of a giraffe. Or maybe they were identically barren of life.
She pulled the ribbons from around Anda’s teeth, one by one, and flicked them into the drainage grate.
Horwitz walked closer to Marni, but he stopped behind the vertical pole of an umbrella. “What did you just pull out of her mouth?”
“Plastic.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.” Anda liked the feeling of old wetsuits in her mouth, and although it was not the safest decision, Marni would occasionally find a suit beyond repair, ball it up with a zip-tie, and play catch with Anda.
“I need that as evidence, Marina,” he said.
“Come here, then.”
Horowitz didn’t move from behind the umbrella stand. She opened Anda’s mouth again and beckoned Horowitz. “Come here.”
Horwitz shuffled around the pole and towards Marni and the whale, but he came haltingly, every step seeming like a decision. Marni couldn’t help but see in the Sergeant the trembling body of an abused animal, perking with the promise of food from an open hand, but shrinking with the memories of what the hand could also do. She saw these animals everywhere—the rabbit cages of her redneck neighbor, the man down the street with the golden retriever chained to a stake.
“Hands out,” she said. “Hands out, no jewelry.”
He twisted off his wedding ring and slid it into one of the many pockets of his uniform. Up close, the animal had a kelpy smell, which came from her breath. Her shiny skin became criss-crossed with thin scratches and tiny wrinkles.
Horwitz let his hands go limp. “You want me to touch it? I don’t see how this is relevant.”
The front desk charged 350 dollars for a whale meet-and-greet, which included around ten seconds of stroking a whale. The people would come, rich people from the city, and they’d speak openly about Marni with reverence and jealousy. “What a life,” a man said once. “She’d paid to play with the whales all day.”
Anda made a soft squeak and shifted her body to face Sergeant Horwitz head-on. There was a mildness in her eyes. She slitted them nearly shut.
Marni looked at Horwitz, who had backed up a few steps. “She wants you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just touch her.”
As he reached out his bare left hand, Anda moved forward to meet it. He stroked the dome of her head, the part that was all black and stiffened by a sack of oil for echolocation. He lingered for a moment, and retracted his hand.
From the trainer’s control unit, Marni pressed in the sequence of keys to open the lock on the Classroom gate to a smaller side pool. It was like solving a puzzle. The six other whales at the stadium were spread out among the other pools. She wanted to clear a way for Anda without opening up the Classroom for the other whales to come barreling through. She had solved these problems so many times, sometimes in the heat of a show when a redirection was necessary.
As seen from the control unit, the body was thrown into even more relief against the pool lights. Marni thought should see its individual fingers, but when the curled
knuckles disappeared, she knew that it was a trick of the water distortion and the moon, which was starting to set.
The grid of dials on the control panel seemed endless in their permutation. Every dial could move a six-thousand pound animal, if it was willing. Marni had to visualize every gate passage like she did many years ago, when she first started working the controls.
Finally, she gave the signal for Anda to swim through the open gate. Anda rolled to one side, looked at Marni through her left eye, and turned away. She swam over to the dark shadow and dipped her head down. Marni gave the signal again, but Anda didn’t even acknowledge her this time. The whale seemed to circle the body like a massive log caught in a whirlpool.
She turned to Sergeant Horwitz, who stood on the far edge of the Classroom. He had finished taking his pictures and was writing on a clipboard pushed against his belly.
“Doesn’t want to move,” she said.
“Coroner will be here in ten minutes.” Sergeant Horwitz turned the page over and kept writing.
Right on the pool deck there had been an open backpack the whole time. Marni saw it even before Horwitz started taking his pictures. She had an instinct to look for foreign objects around the pool that the whales could pull in and accidentally swallow. As she walked through the corridor for the first time, she could see the towel balled inside, a woman’s swimsuit, a pile of other things hidden in the shadows. A part of Marni knew immediately what that backpack meant, whose body that belonged to. With the whales, Marni had always taught the principle of one-badbridge: a single signal can ruin a whole animal. Ruin it forever.
So instead she chose the moon, the ripples of the water. She played petting-zoo with an armed Sheriff. Marni looked away from the backpack yet again, but her gaze caught on the dead Medilights with the expensive emergency batteries that only Roxy would be inexperienced enough to use. She saw the trainer’s break room with the door propped open with an empty bucket, the light still on. She thought of her son, how he played hide and seek by only covering his eyes.
She looked at the backpack. She saw a loop of lanyard around a shoulder strap. The cloth strip was embroidered with purple chrysanthemum flowers, and she remembered the day when Roxy showed her this lanyard. Roxy loved Chrysanthemum flowers and Chrysanthemum tea too, with the Goji berries, ice sugar.
Marni stood up. “You want the body? I can dive.”
“The whale’s still in the pool.”
She pulled her arms together in a streamline and jumped.
The water hit Marni like it did every morning on her first dive. Before the wetsuit developed its insulating layer of warm water, everything was chokingly cold, to the point where hyperventilation was almost a reflex. It had taken three months in a free-diving class to remove that reflex.
With her eyes open underwater, everything took on a blurry cast, and as Marni breaststroked her way to the bottom, there was a blissful increase in uncertainty. The body could have been a toy again, or an old grate rattled loose from the filtration system. Even as she got up close and saw the outline of a chest and head, it could have been any thrillseeker who had tried to swim with a killer whale.
But when Marni started sliding her arms around the body in search for a handhold, she knew immediately that it was Roxy. Her fingers first brushed the silver whistle bridge that was the mark of a trainer. And as she wrapped an arm under Roxy’s own arms, the shape of her flesh was so familiar.
Marni could imagine the steps that Roxy had taken, the wet footprints on the concrete. She saw the MediLights tucked under each arm as Roxy dragged them from the vet’s shed. She saw the little cake of gelatin that Roxy had been making in the afternoon. The backpack by her side, lanyard to bypass the security alarm. And in the white beams of the MediLights, Anda still swimming stiff, calling to her daughter Koko. In her last moments, Roxy may have made one final realization: an animal may misread human emotion, human compassion. Agitation was agitation, and Roxy was in the way. Her colors would have shone in the lights. Pink and blue, the sweettart suits, as Marni called them.
Marni adjusted her grip on Roxy, and from above, she saw the whale arch her body and drift down, until she felt Anda’s rostrum brush against her shoulder. She recoiled, and then wondered why she did. Out of all the whales, Anda was the least prone to aggression.
She put her hand on the groove of Anda’s jaw, and they floated, not quite on the bottom, but far from the surface of silver water. Did you do this? She wanted to ask, as she did many times before, when a toy got mangled in the Classroom, or a dead Heron was found, torn to shreds. Naughty, naughty girl, she would say in falsetto, and Anda would find it quite amusing.
Marni wondered what would happen to Anda. By midday, the killing would probably be national news. By week’s end, there would probably be a federal investigation. In the next thirty minutes, she would have to make a phone call to
Roxy’s husband, somehow. When all was over, Marni would probably not be a whale rider anymore. Nobody would be a whale rider, and the safety binders would become another volume thicker.
Anda made a sound that Marni recognized immediately. Right here in the park, researchers had once made a discovery. While the whale dialect was far from the complexities of human speech, they found that Anda had consistent sounds associated with living things. This sound was a key to the researcher’s discovery. It was highly correlated with Marni’s presence. They called it her name.
Marni had raised Anda from a calf. She watched the floppy, wrinkled thing slide out of her mom in a billow of crimson. As the calf grew, Marni saw her fat expand to fill the nascent wrinkles in her skin. Anda developed a bacterial infection just a few months after she’d been weaned, and it carved a lesion down her left lung. At the worst of the infection, when the antibiotics were being flown from a laboratory in Europe, Marni had stayed up for two days and two nights, keeping the calf’s head above water.
The whale rolled to one side, exposing the bulge of flesh that housed her eye. Everything was blurry, but Marni knew that Anda’s irises were the darkest blue. Marni’s own eyes were Pacific-blue. She felt the heft of Roxy in her arms, the gentle pressure of Anda on her shoulder. Marni imagined that their irises were concentric circles, rings of blue, one encapsulating the other.
When Marni came to the surface, Sergeant Horwitz took hold of Roxy’s body and moved it far away from the edge. She gestured to a pile of tarps that the trainers used for additional shade on the hotter summer days. “Cover her,” she said. “Please.”
“Do you know her?” asked Sergeant Horwitz.
Marni nodded, and said nothing more. She walked out of the Classroom and over the bridge that led to the platform where the trainers would mount the whales, straddling them like horses or standing on their pectoral flippers like a pogo stick. She had a little blurb prepared for the shows, right after they finished the acrobatics. When you’re on a whale, she would say, the past slips below the surface, and the future is shattered by torpedo-body of a whale. There is nothing but the present.
Right next to Marni hung the Telecue, with all the buttons mapping to every behavior. Row E were the rides, all ten of them. Some were very easy. A trainer just needed to sit behind the dorsal fin and hold it like a safety rail. Others were tremendously hard, like the rocket hop, where the full force of the whale passed through the clasped hands of a trainer as they shot twenty feet out of the water.
The control unit was powered down, so the Telecue was inactive. Marni found herself pressing all the buttons on row E. They were soft silicone, like large keyboard letters. She kneaded the buttons between her fingers, as they indented and sprung back with soft noises. A dark blue had begun to ring the horizon. Astronomical twilight. That’s what it was called. Marni loved the term; it seemed so expansive for no good reason. The moment in every morning when the darkness decided to recede. The moment in every night when the light ceases to exist.
Over the radio, Sergeant Horwitz gave directions to the coroner and the homicide investigator. When they came down the long corridor, they looked at the shape under the aquamarine tarp, the wet spots on the concrete.
“When you think you’ve seen it all—“ began the coroner, but the Sergeant Horwitz just shook his head and he stopped speaking.
From the front stage came Marni. She was dressed in a plain black wetsuit. Her ponytail was wet and stuck to her shoulder. In her hands she carried a silver bucket. At the sound of the metal, Anda stiffened and swam through the open gate to the medical pool.
“Yeah, you want brecky? Want brecky?”
From the silver bucket, Marni grabbed the largest handful of fish that she could carry. With a plop, she dropped it into the whale’s hungry mouth.
Let me start from the beginning. The first time the world ended.
I am four years old, small for my age. Nothing bad has happened to me yet. For a few hours of my life, I have a sister. She lives a brief life in the hospital before dying of a congenital abnormality. This, despite the wonders of modern medicine. This, despite living in the richest country in the world. I don’t really remember the details because I am also very young. All I know is that death has always been my next-door neighbor. And that I am the one who lived.
I become prematurely obsessed with premature death, and all the ways it can be wrought. There is the apocalypse of wildfires. Of tides encroaching, foot by foot. Of hurricanes so strong they can knock down your front door. The apocalypse of the ozone layer. Of the too-harsh sun, charring your father’s tomato garden into wasteland. The poet Mary Oliver says, Tell me what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life. The answer that arrives to me: I will fight for the chance to live it til the end.
When I am sixteen I help plan a walk-out at my high school. It is happening in coordination with schools across the country, even the world. I have never met the other organizers, would not have met them if not for the internet. We’ve seen the tweets, the articles, the calls for action, and we feel that they are speaking directly to us. We form committees on the national, state, city level. (Somehow, every kid on the Okeechobee committee is queer.) We’re marching about so many things that are technically different — fracking, mass shootings, police at our school — but feel the same in our bodies, which is to say, like a punch in the gut. We spread the word in groupchats, DMs. We don’t tell any adults what we are planning, not even our parents.
The day of the walk-out is so lovely and temperate, it is like the climate is conspiring to undermine us. In the class periods before, I am on edge, looking around the hallways, wondering, when the time comes, which of us will rise to our feet. But, at the chosen hour, hundreds of us walk out. We gather on the football field, beneath the faded banner of our school’s Native mascot, flattening the turf with our collective feet. We recite poems and make speeches, and everybody claps and snaps at just the
right moments. I feel hope, in that moment, for kids my age—the way we listen to each other, and bear each other’s witness, even when most adults have no reason to care.
My mother finds out that night when Namrata Aunty calls and tells her to turn on the evening news. There I am, being interviewed by the local TV channel. I don’t remember giving the interview—the walk-out was a blur. My name is misspelled and I am talking too fast, but who cares? Mom yelps in surprise and nearly drops the phone. You did this, Rishi? she says. Why?! And I think of saying, because the sky has teeth, the ocean has fingers, the men have guns, all of them coming to kill us, but I know that will prompt a fight. She will think I sound crazy. I tell her, Hear me out. I tell her, It will look good on my college applications.
A month later, the climate queers and I plan a campaign called a die-in. We symbolize the climate crisis by laying, like corpses, in prominent locations: senators’ offices, the Capitol lawn, the president’s Florida golf estate, even. We let it be known: the people in power are actively killing us. Those of us in Orlando organize a die-in at a Publix supermarket, whose CEO recently donated millions to a pro-fracking candidate. I am awake for forty-eight consecutive hours organizing the protest. Instead of dying on the cold linoleum, I accidentally fall asleep. I startle awake, not when the others start chanting, or the managers debate calling the police, but when a shopper’s flip flop-clad foot narrowly misses my face.
Later the photo goes viral, of dozens of teenagers lying dead in the dairy aisle. That is how I gain my first ten thousand followers on Twitter. I shoot off a half-dozen tweets each day. When trolls send me angry messages, I clap back. I do not lie down and take bullshit. I do not lie down unless it is part of ghastly protest art, mimicking my own death for a scrap of political clout. Soldiering onwards, trying not to scream when somebody calls us inspiring, or social media savvy, because is it terrific or tragic that we’re so good at live-tweeting our own deaths?
And that is how years of my life go by, in a breakneck race towards adulthood, against apocalypse. I get invited to national conferences and marches. I skip my high school prom to attend a hearing. And it is only after the world ends anyway that I think of what it did to me, how it built my sense of narrative and justice. How I often think of real events like a story unfolding. I think about my character growth, and what future chapters could contain. And if I could write this as a novel, this is how it would end: the climate queers would win. People would tire of our pain, tire of the
rising tides and burning forests, and their hearts would change. Republicans would vote in droves for climate justice reform, and more men would go to therapy—either that, or they’d spontaneously combust—and we could melt down all the firearms and use them to build high-speed public railways. I’ve imagined this fictional version of events so many times, it feels like a memory, sitting as a neighbor to the real story in my mind.
The real story is less satisfying. The real story is this: for two years of our lives, the climate queers were in frenzied motion, marching and bartering and pleading for our lives. We wrote bills, we published op-eds, we tried to live our lives as if the world was already healed. And when the dust settled, we realized nothing changed. There were small improvements in my life—awards, scholarships, friendships with girls like Clara Green, and most importantly, a ticket out of Okechobee. But ultimately no major legislation was passed on climate; no candidate endorsed our cause; the companies we boycotted reported record levels of profit. Our bills, too, died prematurely. The world we fought for never came. And the loss of something you dreamed of—something you intended to hold in your arms—felt like a story I had already been told.
I am not trying to equate this loss with my mother’s. I did not carry my future in my womb; I lost something I had never known. At any rate, I think about my sister only once per week. It seems like a lot until you compare it to the number of times per day I think about whether I look stupid, or if it is time to pee. One day I learn just how many American mothers—mostly Black and native—contribute to statistics of infant mortality. My grandparents, too, lost siblings. It was a common occurrence for all the generations before them. My father once told me that women of the ‘olden days’— this was the phrase he always used—did not hold their babies for the first twentyfour hours after birth. And did not name them for a month. This to protect them from the inevitability that if the child died, it would rip from them a piece of their heart. This in order to survive.
What I am trying to say: the end of the world came and kept coming, and my family moved on. I have never fully discussed this sister with my parents.It has never occurred to me to write about her. What claim do I have to her story? Absolutely none. I just think of her from time to time. But not nearly as much as I think of my mother.
She doesn’t pick me up from the airport. My father stands alone in the baggage claim.He is wearing the Stanford Daddy sweatshirt that he doesn’t know my gay friends wear ironically. A bandana across his nose and mouth.
Where’s Mom? I say.
She’s at home. We thought it was safest for only one of us to come to the airport. She said we have to be really careful, and I shouldn’t even hug you, but — oh well, we’ll just not tell her—
My dad pulls me into his arms. He gives me a banana, like he would when he picked me up from swim class as a kid. Puts my small carry-on in the trunk.
What is happening, I say. What are we supposed to be doing.
Eat your banana. This morning I bought four dozen, my father says. The shelves were nearly empty, it was just like before a hurricane. And your grandparents are quarantining in their apartment in Chennai. All across India there is a serious lockdown. At least here in Florida we can still go to the stores, but we’re worried about Thatha particularly — he has bad lungs, and besides he and Paati are getting old, we are not there to help them. We’re going to call them twice a day, to keep their spirits up. Your mother has disinfected the entire house, and, listen, she is very worried. Don’t say anything that will upset her.
Like what?
My dad briefly meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. He looks like he’d rather discuss anything else in the world.Finally he says, What you told her about yourself at Stanford. Please don’t bring it up again, kanna. Not in our home.
I swallow my banana too fast. Not now? I say. Or not ever?
All the courage I’d felt when I came out to Mom — the righteousness, the truthfulness of inviting her into my world— has deserted me. I am in the passenger seat of my father’s car and all of a sudden I am thirteen years old again. I am diving into the pool, the cold, the free-fall.
My dad pulls into our exit. I don’t know anything about being gay, Rishi. I don’t know
what to say. Please just be nice to her, okay?
Sure enough, when we step into the house, Mom lies in wait, armed with towels and a hamper. She, too, is wearing a bandanna across her face. Rishi, don’t come any further, she commands. Then she spreads a towel wide, blocking me from view, and instructs me to take off my clothes.
Are you serious? I just got here—
Rishi, don’t be annoying! You’ve been on a cross-country flight and that virus is all over California. Just take it off. Take this towel and go straight to the shower.
It is too early—within the first thirty seconds—to fight her. I remember Dad’s request to be nice to Mom, and though I hate to establish the precedent, I obey her. Like a good daughterI run full-speed to the shower. I wash myself as well as I can, giving special attention to places I never really consider, like the inside of my bellybutton and the crease behind my ear.
Mom has laid out an outfit for me on the bathroom counter. I am dismayed to discover that my high school clothes no longer fit me. I force myself into an old pair of running shorts and a faded T-shirt from my high school’s climate justice club. I understand why they give prisoners ill-fitting uniforms to humble them. My face is scrubbed so red, I look like a sausage squeezed back into its bag.
We sit down for dinner and Dad informs me that due to a recent health documentary Mom saw, we are now a rice-free household. Instead of steaming basmati with my rasam, Mom offers me a heap of riced cauliflower.
What’s wrong with rice? I stare at her.
Dad makes a pained expression, but Mom says, Too many carbohydrates.
But rice is our whole culture. Racist people call us rice-eaters. Not veggie-based alternative—
Culture, bulture, my mom says. You see, Indian uncles and aunties are dropping dead left and right from diabetes, heart attacks, obesity. And even you, Rishi, you’re looking chubby. I can see your clothes have gotten tight.
I cross my arms over my T-shirt. My dad says, The texture is very similar. You won’t mind it.
You can’t call me fat, I say, and Mom frowns.
Cha. It’s not to hurt your feelings, okay? It’s very common. They call it the freshman fifteen, Mom says, pronouncing the f’s with a decisive exhalation. I’ve seen so many of these college girls come back for breaks looking like winter gourds.It’s okay, Rishi. You can still reverseit. We can do indoor exercise videos together, if you manage to wake up in the mornings.
I refuse to eat the alternative rice. I tell her I am justified because even Gandhi went on a hunger strike. She tells me, Go ahead, starve. See if I care.
But we both know that is a lie, and soon enough, she is looking in the fridge for some rice to warm up for me. I eat it with my fingers, filling my belly properly for the first time in weeks. My mother says nothing but watches with fire in her eyes. I know right then that it is going to be a very long lockdown.
When it is time to sleep I go to my room. I have outgrown it, like my clothes. I brought my favorite possessions with me to college, so those left behind form a sad, dusty museum to the girl I used to be. A smattering of trophies I won in middle school. Hanging above my bed, the huge hand-painted canvas banner we’d made for the national climate march on Washington, the one where I met Clara. THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL SAVE THE WORLD, it shouts. A mean laugh bubbles in me when I see it.
My room smells like cleaning supplies — Mom has been through. She’s made my bed with a comforter I don’t recognize. In the center of my bed is my old stuffed pony, Kudhirai. I learned to french braid on her plasticky hair. I didn’t know she was still around.
I thought your old comforter was getting ragged, my mom says, appearing behind me.
Thanks, Mom. I like it, I say. My dad appears and flops onto my bed, spreading his arms wide. Just testing the new comforter, he says. Oh, very nice. Soft.
Kumar, your back, my mom yells in Tamil, and my dad leaps back up. Last year we discovered my dad has untreated scoliosis from childhood and now he is only allowed to sleep on specific, expensive Tempurpedic mattresses.
Don’t stay up all night on your phone, Mom warns. Here, you can give it to me if you want.To avoid the temptation.
No, thank you. I duck her outstretched hand.
The second my parents close the door, I turn on my phone. Messages from the group chat immediately flood my screen. Everyone has reached their homes, everyone is safe. I scroll through the updates from my friends. Georgia says she is happy to see her dog Gandalf again. Clara says her parents prematurely converted her bedroom into a second office space and now she has to sleep on the couch. Imraan says that after two months of the dining hall, they can no longer tolerate their mother’s spice. Pietro says he is looking at hometown Tinder to see who else has come out. I read the texts in their voices and feel reassured.
For several minutes I look at their locations on my phone map, like marbles scattered across a board. I zoom into Georgia’s icon. Last night our small blue dots slept on top of one another. Now she is one thousand, five hundred and thirteen miles away.
I videocall Georgia, but she doesn’t pick up—is probably asleep — so I scroll way down in my message history and open my conversation with Kavya.
Hey did you reach New York? i’m in okechobee, I am eating well. hope you are doing okay.
Kavya responds almost immediately with a photo of what seems to be the view from her window. A skyline of buildings with brightly-lit windows, a near-empty street.
yeah. it’s like surreal,nobody’s on the street. I grew up coming here but it’s never been this quiet, she says. How is stuff with your mom
We are already locked in mortal combat, I say. We are fighting about rice. rice but really the fact that you are gay, Kavya says.
lmao u know indian moms so well….
A lifetime of reading between the lines, Kavya says.
Then, without knowing why, I lift my phone and text her photo out of my own window, which faces our backyard. My father’s hibiscus bush grows outside, casting leafy shadows on my bed. When I was little I would imagine the branches tapping on the glass were the fingers of handsome men clawing at my window to kiss me.
Kavya’s typing bubble appears, then disappears.
You too. Sleep well <3
But I don’t sleep, not immediately. Instead I turn on my front-facing camera and look at myself, closely. I look beautiful, my breasts full and fat from all the dining hall food. And I think, what a shame, that nobody is going to get to see this for a while.
I slide off the too-tight shorts so my body can breathe. I dig out my vibrator from high school but the batteries are long dead, so I do it old-school. My free hand grips the new comforter. I feel Kudhirai, my old friend. I had forgotten she was here.
At some point I squeeze Kudhirai between my thighs, riding up against her. She is a plushie, not a person, so the harder I push, the more she concaves. I feel like I am charging up a hill and if it doesn’t break soon, I will. Sweat moistens my inner thighs. I can hear myself panting in frustration. I push in one finger, then another, but the feeling stalls, so I ball up my own fist. I punch Kudhirai in the face.
In the morning I check my phone for the next email, the harbinger of doom. I want to know when I can go back to school. But the longer I look, the worse it gets. College kids are partying up and down the Floridian coast. People call for their summary execution. The government extends the social distancing orders until the end of next month. Stanford pushes back the start of the spring term for an extra two weeks. I feel sick. The finish line is nowhere in sight.
What to do, what to say? I have never felt this way before. Inert, empty, helpless. When I was a teenager faced by cataclysmic extinction, I thought, okay, we can
protest. We can sign letters, we can march. There is an honor in fighting against something larger than you, and fighting it until the very end. But this time, there is nothing I can do. It is the opposite of coming together to fight—it is crawling into separate holes to die. I continually refresh Twitter. It is a dumpster fire. Glamorous celebrities post throwback pictures from the last time they went outside. Everyone gets mad at them. People with no medical authority speculate about how long the pandemic will last. I see the figure ‘eighteen months’ and immediately delete the app. But I have no self control, so I log back in from my laptop. The internet’s denizens remind me to stay home, for God’s sake. Think about society. Do my part. Flatten the curve.Remember the unequal impacts of the pandemic. Check on my neighbors. Check my privilege. Combat misinformation. Keep the faith. I think Twitter is so popular right now because it is something you can do while laying on your ass. It is the great equalizer for the bedridden and the depressed.
In the early days at home, all I do is sleep. I sleep for long, thick hours; they spread across the day like jelly. The first week is technically my spring break, so I am allowed to sleep unbothered. But on the second, my mother takes to banging pots and pans if I’m not up by early afternoon. Who is this lazy sleep-demon, she demands, and what have you done to my daughter?
But what is there to wake up for? I have no place to be. Nothing to do except fight with my mother, eat her rice. To pass the waking hours I read. Mostly poetry, which is short enough to sustain my attention. A lot of it is about animals, wild geese and wild horses and the like; people are reposting them online, because right now it is the animals who know what we don’t, about how to sit vulnerably inside your own mortal flesh. To challenge myself, I download a sprawling PDF of Bocaccio’s Decameron, the great plague epic. It is set during the Black Death in fourteenth century Florence, and is about ten young Italians who seclude themselves in a villa on the edge of town. For ten days, they tell a hundred stories around the fire about love and death, the tricks of fortune, fortifying themselves with collective wisdom. (Oh Boccaccio, you would have loved the queer group chat!) I find it interesting that, although the kids run away, they ultimately intend to return to Florence and build it anew. As if they owe the old world anything. I used to feel like them. But now — now! — if I had the chance to flee our collapsing society, to build a tree house with all my friends? You could bet your bottom dollar that I wouldn’t look back.
At night I watch Tamil movies with my parents. Optimistically, my dad keeps the English subtitles off, but then he gets tired of me asking him what is going on, why are they yelling, so he turns them on. Like clockwork, my mother falls asleep in the second act of every movie. No amount of banging pots or dishoom-dishoom on-screen fighting can wake her up. She snores, softly, through the climax of the film.I do not understand her. It requires an extraordinary sense of contentment with the world, to fall asleep during a movie, trusting that everything will turn out okay in the end, with or without your watchful eye.
The alligators are the first to emerge from lockdown. A few days into quarantine, a mother gator with her baby, scooped tight inside her jaws, crawls laboriously across the intersection near our house, for once free of traffic.Where is she headed? There is nothing but subdivisions for miles. Maybe she is following a childhood memory of a green stream. A pond since drained and razed and studded with sidewalks, fences, houses. I watch her from the window and feel grief. My reptile brain is mourning for something—an untouched world, a different landscape, a simpler time that I am not sure exists.
For the blink of an eye, Okechobee looks primordial. The highways are empty, as are the restaurants and malls, and the Okeechobee library that carried me through adolescence. Online I see photos of empty landmarks, perfect as postcards, graphs of declining carbon emissions, reports of whales returning, after generations, to the polluted waters of the Hudson River. What is bad for humans is good for literally everybody else. Whenever I feel like I am dying, I try to remind myself that the Florida manatees are exceptionally happy.
And I feel like I am dying, starting in April, starting with the email. Three days before the spring quarter is meant to begin, Stanford makes it official: we will not be returning to campus for the rest of the year. And, as if they have coordinated the attack, the Moscow program director emails next, informing us that, obviously, unfortunately, our summer study abroad is cancelled. Stay home, good luck, try your best not to die.
Clara immediately texts the group chat: a whole quarter online. what the actual fuck
Imraan: aight I guess imma just off myself right now. It was nice knowing you guys
Georgia types back: here if u want to call me and process!! Ily
By this point most schools and offices have shut down; my mother’s office is closed until Memorial Day, my father’s indefinitely. Public health officials announce that several hundred thousand American deaths are inevitable, even if we all stay home, even if we wear masks, even if we follow the rules perfectly from now until the end— even then, it is already too late. We cannot go back. That world is gone. But still.
Still! It is like looking out of a window and seeing nothing but blackness, blankness ahead. All I can think: I had so many plans for the spring. I had served my winter, and the sun was coming out! I was going to wear dresses and drive to Los Angeles with Georgia. I was going to lay on the Oval and read. I was going to swim at the beach. I was going to ask a woman on a date—any woman would do—and dance my heart out with my friends. All of these things were going to happen, plus a million other things that I couldn’t have planned. This, more than any specific experience, is what I miss—the feeling of anticipation, the butterflies in your stomach, like you could wake up in the morning and anything could happen.
And it is so selfish to mourn for my own lost year.Criminal, even, when Imraan texts pictures of body bags being unloaded from their apartment building in Queens; when millions of displaced Indian laborers are marching home on foot, perishing in the heat; when domestic violence cases are rising from women locked indoors with abusers. The uncomfortable truth: all my life there has been human suffering. Children bombed in the Middle East in a war as old as I am. American faucets spilling lead into kitchen glasses. Until now I’ve turned a blind eye. Such suffering was mere comparison for mine, fodder for threats by my mother—finish your rice, children are eating worms in Africa; do your homework, girls are toiling in sweatshops. When it comes to violence, this pandemic is nothing new: it’s just that my luck’s run out, and I am the stupidest girl in the world—
I put my phone down, lie in bed, and look up at the ceiling fan. For a bizarre moment I feel sorry for it—brave, lonely, spinning in place. I remember a writing exercise from Easha’s class: put yourself inside of an inanimate object. Describe it. For weeks I identified with the lounge chair, Georgia’s lava lamp, the jacaranda outside our dorm. What was she teaching us? How to step outside of ourselves. For a moment, now, I leave my body. I float up to the ceiling fan, each blade furred with dust on its
left side, and I say goodbye to the version of spring that I knew.The future I thought I was entitled to. None of it was mine to keep.
That night I dream of the old world. I dream that I am pre-gaming for a party in me and Georgia’s room. She has boughta big handle of vodkaand we are drinking like water. I still can’t drink liquor without wrinkling my nose. The cold air hits as we file out of the dorm, alcohol burning steadily through our veins. Within minutes, we’ll be speaking in Spanish, incoherent to anyone but ourselves. I twist my hips and shake my head to induce dizziness, speed up drunkenness. Four shots to get drunk, like clockwork. Incoherent thoughts, like: if we were siblings, this is how we’d vibe in the womb. Or, I wish I knew Georgia as a little girl, so I could better protect her. I don’t even want to go to the party. Just being with her in our room is enough.
My parents begin working from home. Mom claims the home office, so my father takes the second bedroom.We have this big suburban home, the kind you are supposed to stuff to the brim with children, but it is just the three of us. I imagine our home like a cell, each of us enclosed by impermeable membranes. I read that, once infected, the virus will stay in your RNA forever. It becomes part of you, wedged inside your cells along with everything you’ve inherited from your mother and father.
I get the funny feeling I am living in two places at once. There is the world around me, the home I share with my parents: our rattan sofa, the whirring dishwasher, daily lunches of yogurt rice and lemon pickle. High school t-shirts and mismatched socks—we haven’t worn shoes in days. My parents and their outsized voices, yelling on the phone to my grandparents, as if trying to call across the ocean itself.I am physically trapped in this world, but I don’t inhabit it. My mind lives elsewhere: texting my friends, reading queer fanfiction, tweeting jokes that I would otherwise tell my friends, to their faces. I wonder how it is possible to co-habit with people who know so little about me. I only feel like myself inside my phone. For hours each day I stare into it like a crystal ball. I sleep with it under my pillow, though I know about radiation. It contains my friends, my entire world, the pixels that form the image of Georgia, who video calls me once or twice a day to report the latest thoughts that have crossed her mind. Some things she reports:
A bird has built a nest on her windowsill. She is downloading an app to identify it.
She accidentally saw her brother Jasper’s penis because he keeps leaving the bathroom door open when he pees. He is unused to having her back at home.
She is eating a pizza bagel for dinner. Her parents are not big into cooking. They are also particularly busy saving American lives. It really puts everything into perspective.
She thinks she ought to learn a language next quarter. She just doesn’t know which one. Maybe Chinese, which seems statistically significant.
Actually, she is going to enroll in three online math classes. Because if she is not allowed to get dick for the rest of spring, she might as well get fucked over by her psets.
The bird is a common grackle!
What about me, what I am doing?
Aside from thinking of you?
Not much, I say. Just reading. Eating food.
Inside our freezer we have months’ worth of vegetables, three-dozen bananas, and pre-made parathas that my mom presses, bare-handed, onto a hot skillet each evening. Our guava tree ripens — earlier and earlier each spring — fruit dropping like bombs, faster than we can harvest them. One guavadrops so hard that it bruises my father when he is weeding nearby.It could have concussed him. My mother cuts the offending guava into slices and feeds it to me for breakfast with chili powder. It gives me the shits.
Hold strong, soldier, Georgia says, but she is laughing.
I am trying to hold strong. On Twitter I follow a bot that posts daily quotes from Susan Sontag’s diaries. In 1949 she wrote, I want sensuality and sensitivity, both. I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments. And I think of how the past six months of my life have been filled to the brim, spilling over into art, how it felt like a second puberty, this time at warp-speed. More alcohol and less acne, but the rest of it felt the same: the unspoken rules, the fumbling, the
yearning. Newness poured itself over me, sometimes too hard, always too fast, and I wish I had savored it more. For these next months, I know, will be so underfilled, so gouged with longing. Like staring at curtains that are never going to rise.
Florida is one of the last states to issue a stay-at-home order to stop the spread of the disease. The calculation between human lives and good old-fashioned Florida freedom has always been contentious, but now it takes on existential proportions. On the national news, red-faced Floridians refuse to wear masks. They blame the virus on the Democrats, the Chinese, the CIA. My old climate group chats are reactivating, now that everyone’s back in Okechobee. Some of the climate queers want to start pushing the state and federal governments for action against climate change. They say the world is changing, the old rules are bending, and we have a chance to push things in our favor. The governor issued a stay-at-home order, someone tweets. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that executive action is impossible. Green New Deal, now!
I start to type, and then delete it. I switch to Snapchat and see pictures of Mythili Aunty’s pervy son Chinmay smoking weed.
Hey can I get some of that, I type.
He replies almost instantly: Lmaooooooooo didn’t know u were chill like that rishi.
I think of responding, shut up I literally get more pussy than you. But I don’t; I want his weed. We meet at a gas station for the exchange, where I pop the trunk and he slides it inside, maintaining a safe distance from me, and the second my parents go to bed, I open a window and light up. Thank fucking God, I think, as my mind quiets down. Mommy’s home.
I FaceTime Clara for a virtual smoking date. Invariably we discuss the climate discourse in our group chats. Whether we will participate in the next wave of protests.
It’s a good idea, Clara says. They’re absolutely right. Like, the government just showed its ass about what it is willingto do for the common good. We should be harnessing that energy towards the climate crisis.
The world is changing now, I say. People are angry, but also hopeful.
Clara blows smoke at her camera, and I pretend to suck it through the screen. It makes me giddy to think of it. That apocalypse is not a noun, but a verb. A process that can be negotiated and resisted and stopped in its tracks. A Native poet I like tweets, Our American apocalypse is maybe the best way to start new. She knows about surviving apocalypse, about building anew, she knows it in her bones. She tweets, It’s morning now, morning is when revolutions start.
Not me, says Clara. I feel like something is wrong with me.
You’re not angry? I say. Or not hopeful?
I feel a lot of things, Clara says. But I don’t know if anger or hope is one of them right now.
But you used to care so much, I say. And, like, so did I. We felt like the house was on fucking fire. We kept pointing it out and screaming and everyone else just stood and stared.
I start feeling sick in my belly again, the way I do when I remember the die-in at the grocery store. I feel bitter that Clara and I skipped class to fight with politicians instead of to smoke weed, or have sex, or whatever normal people do in high school. All this to get into Stanford, where we will read articles and write papers about people who are dying, in theory. Where entire academic departments, like economics, exist to gaslight us. To trick us into competing for consulting jobs or accumulating student debt, when the most useful task was actually to sew ourselves fire-proof skin.
Clara says, I didn’t stop caring. It’s not like I’m ignoring it. You just have to get used to it. You learn to keep living in a house on fire.
I recall there is a viral meme encapsulating exactly that sentiment. The dog sipping coffee in a burning house. This is fine, he says, sipping his coffee. This is fine. His face starts melting off.
Is this the only way to endure, to live to fight another day? Clara and I look at each other through the phone, and I think, I cannot save you, dear friend. I used to think it
was possible. I used to believe the universe would measure each person’s individual level of effort, take note of what we wanted, and dole out good fortune accordingly. I don’t know what I believe anymore.
We begin classes on what is ostensibly a Monday, but could be any day of the week — time has blurred together, the distinctions between days, weeks, even months rendered meaningless. I sit sort of upright in my bed and join an online video call for my American Poetry seminar. I click through the faces of my classmates onscreen and imagine who, if we were on campus, I would’ve tried to fuck. There is one boy, Chris, whose face I like. It is hazy and softly back-lit. I enlarge his video and trace his lips with my finger. Then I remember Chris could be any height in real life.
Another boy, Toby, has his laptop positioned on a low surface—maybe a coffee table —so that the camera is pointed, embarrassingly, at his crotch. I take a screenshot and text it to Georgia. New class crush?!!!
ewwwwww you should use the filter that turns him into a pineapple, Georgia writes back.
I laugh aloud before I realize that everybody can see me. But then I remember I have no reason to be embarrassed. When you are online, there are no consequences for bad behavior.If anybody tries to come after you, you can simply turn off your screen.
How was your first day of school, my mother asks me, when I limp out of my bedroom—both of my legs have fallen asleep. I tell her, Okay. There’s no point in telling the truth, which is that I have no connection or interest in the small, pixellated humans on my laptop screen. That I wish we could call the whole term a wash and try again next year, that I don’t understand why we are collectively lying to ourselves, that we wouldn’t be better off staying in bed. But instead we’ve decided the show must go on. Even if it’s laggy and poorly-lit and everyone keeps forgetting they’ve muted themselves.
As the weather warms, Georgia texts me, matter-of-factly, The sun will make people act like fools. They will start gathering and super-spreading. And even more people
will die.
Georgia is right. In the weeks that follow, hundreds of thousands of people die. The death toll surpasses 100,000 in America alone.I don’t know any of the dead,until I do. The first person to go is my grandfather. My dad’s dad. Until I was thirteen, I didn’t know what his name was. It didn’t occur to me that he had one at all.
My mother appears at my door at eight in the morning.Rishi, get up, she says, but I ignore her. I do not like to leave my bed before noon. It has been months since I left California, but I am still claiming “jet lag” to justify my sleeping schedule. Because of my mother’s health bender, midnights are the only time I can watch television to my heart’s content, eat evil things in peace. These include popcorn, pasta, and mouthfuls of frosted-over ice cream, months old from the back of the freezer. I live my life until four in the morning. Then, about two hours before my mom wakes up, I return to my own room, draw the blinds, and sleep until she forces me out, kicking and screaming, as if from the womb.
Rishi, get up, she says, this time with an edge to it. When I come outside I see that my dad is crying on the couch. Maybe it is the incongruity of the situation—my dad crying, my mom comforting him, instead of the other way around—but I feel like I should take a video on the old camcorder.
Rishi, kutti, my dad says. We have to some sad news to tell to you.
My mother explains that my grandfather has contracted Covid, and my uncle has rushed him to the hospital but his oxygen levels are dropping rapidly. She somehow manages to say it as though it’s all because I woke up late.
Oh, no, I say. I’m sorry, Dad.
I hug him, and he pats my back in a sort of aggressive way, like a little boy who doesn’t know his own strength. It is the first time that I think maybe my dad could be dying, too. He isn’t, of course. He is in perfect health, has barely even grayed—every morning my mother prays to transfer his genetics to me. It is more how he feels, so small and trusting, like I am his dad. I think about how fragile human bodies are, how unfair it is when somebody has to fight someone twice their size, like deer with automobiles and birds with rifles and humans with an airborne disease.
We’ve been talking to Paati and Mama all morning, my mom says. You should talk to them too. They’re going to try to get Thatha on the phone.
Before I can say anything, Mom is making the call. I hear the shrill ring of a WhatsApp call to India, then what sounds like two metal pans banging and then a motorcycle accident, which means we have successfully made contact. My parents talk to my uncle in Tamil, then the phone is in front of my face.
Hello, Rishika, my uncle says gravely. Your Thatha is not doing well. He is having trouble breathing. We are in the hospital with him now.
My relatives often do this with me—talk to me in slow, matter-of-fact English, like I am stupid, as opposed to monolingual, although maybe to them, there is no difference. I hear my grandmother’s voice in the background, a small scuffle for the phone, and then her face appears, old and grainy.
Hi, Paati! I say, as cheerfully as I can. My grandmother leans in to get a better look at me. The camera angle is off so all I can see is her scalp and the vermillion powder she carefully applies to it each morning. Okay, okay, she says in Tamil. Then, satisfied with her sighting, she returns the phone to her son.
He is very tired, my uncle tells me. He is preparing to leave this world.
I feel like I am experiencing shortness of breath, too. I know I am going to hell for it, or getting reincarnated as a cockroach, or whatever, but I do not want to talk to my dying Thatha on the phone.
If he’s tired, maybe I can talk to him later? I say, but my mom pokes me in the ribs: there will be no later. My uncle flips the camera so I am face-to-face with my grandfather. He has clear oxygen tubes in his nostrils and long ago lost his teeth; I have a vivid image of a sea turtle being strangled by a plastic straw.
Appa, can you hear us? my dad shouts, right into my ear. Rishi is here. Rishi, speak.
My grandfather looks blankly into the camera — I wonder if he recognizes me. I can hear him being similarly coached from the sidelines; my grandma is yelling, Your granddaughter! And my uncle helpfully chimes in, Kumar’s daughter!
Hi! I yell. I almost say, How are you?, but that could be insensitive. I rack my brain for sentences to say in Tamil—but aside from I’m hungry, and stupid white lady, the most frequent phrases I use with my mom, I come up blank.
How-are-you, my grandfather says stiffly in English, and my mom covers her face.
I’m okay. I’m thinking about you, I say. I hope you’re not in very much pain.
All sorts of American platitudes are coming to mind. I could say I love you, but that wouldn’t be true, because I barely know him. I can’t think of what else to say. Finally I say, in English, Be brave.
Hah? says my grandmother, seizing the phone, and my dad shouts it in Tamil, three times, like a war chant: Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! We can no longer see my grandfather’s face. He has been replaced by the inside of my grandmother’s bejeweled earlobe. And then my father gives my hand a squeeze — I have done what I could. I am done. My heart feels like it has been squeezed through an oxygen machine. I wish I could go back to bed.
Later that night, when my grandfather finally passes on, we light candles at our family shrine. If we lived in India, our house would come with a built-in altar, but we are in America, so she’s installed ours inside the linen closet. She has added a photo of my late grandfather to the shrine, and now he smiles benevolently among the rest of the gods. My father is quiet and tearful. He tells me, Thank you Rishi. I know your call made your Thatha’s day.
I feel like shit when he says that. I show my face so freely to my followers on the Internet, I share my heart with friends I’ve known for less than a year—but to my own grandfather I am a stranger. I hardly call him. It’s too awkward. The last time we spoke was when he called me for my birthday. Once he turned nineteen. Once he was twenty-one, and thirty-four, and all the other numbers that led up to seventysomething, the age when he died.
The person I feel for most acutely is my dad, who tries his best to coordinate the funeral from afar. He sends money to clear the hospital bill, talks for hours on the phone with his mother. Still, he cannot be physically present to scatter his father’s ashes, which is the traditional duty of the oldest son; my uncle will do it instead. I overhear my parents talking in the living room. He was a good man, my father is
crying. A very good man, my mother agrees.And there is the thing that cuts the deepest, that my father was not there to say goodbye in person. The travel restrictions are because of the pandemic, but I wonder, now, whether this was always a possibility. This was the risk my parents assumed when they moved to America: that when the moment came, they would not be able to reach their parents in time.
My mother is saying, You can never prepare for these things. It was a quick death. Let it go. The literal phrasing, in Tamil, is Going gone. She is telling him not to hold on to the things he cannot have.
My mom’s dad, my other grandfather, died in a road accident when she was in college. She doesn’t talk about it much. I don’t think she misses him, though. Once when we were in India, she pointed out a twiggy broom in the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen. Your Thatha used to beat us with that, she said. And that was all. Her brother was there too, and he wanted tea, so she got busy making it. In my grandmother’s house she showed me all sorts of objects from her girlhood, like babybibs and school medallions, and this was just another of those things.
The restaurant at Cane Bay leaves its sign on all night, lending the dark a red neon wash. There is no other light on the island road, so the whole beach glows. Under the red night two figures emerge, dripping from the surf.They walk up the beach to a white pick-up parked alongside the road, lean against its frame, and stand still for a long time. The man smokes, burning an orange hole in the scene. The girl holds a bottle of merlot by its neck. There is no sound, in this movie, besides that of the surf striking, retreating, striking again.
Three years later, Anna and I are running the parkway that borders the Hudson. I tell her that I am thinking about writing this essay. “But I don’t know,” I say, between pants, “how do you write poetry about a man who texted with so many emojis?” Anna considers this. She looks west, towards the stone river, the brown skyline beyond. “You had to see them in the water,” she says, and I know she is thinking of another man — her captain, who had a much older girlfriend and a habit of playing with Anna’s anklet when they sat talking in the hold. “They were so beautiful in the water.”
The magazine sends me to interview an artist on the Lower East Side who works only with metrocards, collaging the blue and yellow scraps into new figurations. Once he planted a tree outside his apartment and spent a year sketching all the trash that pedestrians left between its roots. He tells me he seems to specialize in things that vanish. I know an artist upstate, a master woodcarver, who wrought with his own hand the house in which he now sits and drinks and waits to die. There is a metaphor for something here, but what, exactly, I can’t quite tell.
To get to the bar on the cay, you had to take a ferry out from the harbor town. The ferries were quick and run by two brothers, midwestern and middle-aged. Occasionally, before you, Guillermo would steal the old dingy and row me back in exchange for a kiss. All the chairs in the bar were plastic and the floor was sand. Allison worked Wednesdays, which meant we drank mostly for free. I liked Allison— the first time I met her, she told me about a motel on the coast in California, where you could open the window and fall asleep to the sound of the ocean. What an image, to give so freely to a stranger.
When night arrived, the harbor went indigo and took up the boardwalk lights so that the land seemed to melt right into the sea. On the passage back especially, when the free tequila and nicotine were mixing in my bloodstream, the scene took on a sense of manufactured sync. As though it was already media, or memory. The lights on the mastheads at their moorings all took their cues from that Wallace Stevens poem: The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, / As the night descended, tilting in the air, / Mastered the night and portioned out the sea.
Especially that one night, when you hadn’t touched me yet but had told me that you were going to. The blur of light and water deepening the dark, making the night feel acute and specific and rare. Lending words to the sea, and all that. It was always a beautiful image. But now it meant something, took its place within a greater system of meaning, as single stars might constellate into a very old story.
The screen porch outside your basement apartment had animal bones and saltbleached corals hanging on the wall. Two chairs besides a sliding screen door. I remember smoking with you afterwards, you in your koi-fish robe, my bare legs slung across your lap.
The cigarette went down like water, even and delicious. The cigarette, like all welltold stories, has a clear sense of its own beginning, middle and end. In a stolen hour one gets an excellent feel for the potential value of a single minute. This is not a welltold story.
The minute is a relative phenomenon, not unlike a cigarette. Sometimes a cigarette tastes like drinking velvet and sometimes it tastes like nothing; you never know which until your body takes it in. What I wanted most was for that specific minute to prove greater than its general type.
I was learning, with you, that all desire is possible. 3 a.m. and we were up against the boundary of the real. It was firm but yielding, like my body.I thought it was only going to happen once.I was wrong. I asked the cigarette if it might stop burning.
The air that night was so warm and so loud. I lit another.
I saw the painting six months to the day that I left you. It’s big, forceful. First I think it’s a cityscape, hot-red bar-sign neons bleeding into a blue night. Then it’s aquatic, the ocean at dusk, the upper smear of beating orange signaling a sunset. I think of the
island, of evening on the west side, where nothing interrupts the horizon: the last dregs of sunlight burning a long bright line against the deep water. I think of how the water absorbs the shifting light, almost liquifies the atmosphere, holds pigment the way it holds your body. I think of swimming at sunset. That time we took the catamaran out to the sandbar, the surface of the sea darkening before my eyes, the color of the water changing so quickly I wanted to cry. I do cry, now, in the gallery, dry and well-dressed and alone, a wound in a coat.
Joan Mitchell is the woman responsible for my distress. The painting, To the Harbormaster, derives its title from a poem by her close friend, Frank O’Hara, poetlaureate of my twenties. The poem is printed in full on the wall-card next to the work in that black museum font. I wanted to be sure to reach you; / though my ship was on the way it got caught / in some moorings. I am always tying up / and then deciding to depart.
To tell you the truth it wasn’t even my favorite composition in the Mitchell show; I liked Sunflowers best, tight supernovas of deep blue oil paint, each little cosmos perfectly imitating the heft of the dinner-plate sunflowers that bloom every summer in my mother’s garden. But then, that ending: Yet / I trust the sanity of my vessel; and / if it sinks, it may well be in answer / to the reasoning of the eternal voices, / the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
To encounter a canvas and feel a hook between your ribs, taut line reeling you in. I’m sure there is some scientifically cogent explanation for my three-year fixation on this painting. I could’ve researched the exact sequence of neurons required to excite and fire; the direct trajectory of light pinballing around the gallery room and into my cornea; the images oriented and re-oriented so that my well-groomed brain might register this mess of flaxseed oil and linen fibers as art at all.
I could argue that both poem and painting so stun me because they engage a poetic technique that the critic Viktor Shklovsky terms defamiliarization, which intercepts the automatism of perception and forces the viewer back to a purer way of seeing; or invoke Jean Baudillard’s work on simulacra theory, which argues that in the postmodern era abstraction has ceased to replicate reality and instead creates hyperreals, objects without origin, map to places that don’t exist, landscapes of impossible land. The line that anchored the abstract to the objective has gone slack; salt air has rusted the internal machinery of metaphor beyond all hope of repair.
I can intellectualize this despair. But I want to tell you about a moment in Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit. The narrator, a writer, is meeting with a student, who herself wants to write a book about a painter. The student has spent the last five years collecting notes on the painter’s life but can’t bring herself to begin the book. The narrator asks the student why she wants to write about this painter specifically. He’s me, she answers. “What she had said earlier that she wasn’t interested in his paintings, what she was trying to say was that she wasn’t interested in them objectively, as art. They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see.”
The painter’s life is not a literal double of her own, the student goes on to say, but something much more intoxicating: a heightened and clarified articulation of it. She realizes, standing in front of one of his canvases, “that if I had to describe my own life —even though, as I say, the examples would be much less dramatic — I would use exactly those same words.”
Late spring, island spring. We sit at one of the high top tables outside that brunch place that you adored. The stonework on the alley street was uneven and crumbling, as though it were very old and European, as if we really were in Portugal, like we’d talked about. That morning you took me down to your spot off the Cane Bay wall, a depression in the rock and coral about seventy feet from the surface. You said you used to come here and meditate and run your air down to nothing, just looking at the blue void.
At the breakfast table our hair is still ocean-wet; my sandals slide off my feet, exposing their tan and sand-worn soles to the stone. Late spring at the equator. One of the stray roosters picks at something in the alley gutter. The air is dense with light and moisture and somewhere miles above where we sit the afternoon’s rainstorm is just beginning to coalesce, gathering power right out of the sky. You never cared for art. You are all gouache pastels at the breakfast table, like those Winslow Homer paintings I will see at the Met after I leave you.
Late spring, island spring, one of the small alleyways branching like arteries through the port town. I always loved Christianstead, disintegrating, dirty, local as it was. Early in the morning especially, when the light was clean and fresh and a rare quiet fell over the old colonial town, soaking the butter-yellow facades, the bougainvillea blooming deep pinks against the stone.
O’Hara had a made-up theory of poetics that he called Personism, which demanded an extreme directness between artist and audience: the poem as letter, addressed directly to you but dated from before your mother was born. He possessed an oceanic prosody, tense and kinetic and flux. There are no metaphors. The poem will not stay still long enough for the reader to impose her system of order or false coherence onto his wild surfaces. O’Hara’s love poetry almost always features a you address, locating the works loosely in the ode tradition, which is an excellent more for writing towards the liminal, writing eulogies for things that can’t or won’t die. Like the lovers on Keats’ urn, leaning in forever, never kissing—never fading, either.
Lately I’ve been consumed with the wrong ends of all the metaphors, too enamored with the sensation and mess and not remotely interested in the meaning.I think only of the way an anchor strikes the surface of the sea and abandon all together the point of the anchor. The little flexings in your forearms as you coiled line on the bow. The practiced gestures of your hands tying a bowline knot, at work, then later in bed. The weight of the iron, the sound of rope and metal spooling out beneath it, the two quick splashes. The jump.
The silence of the salt. The way my eyes stung when I opened them to find the thing sinking slowly, arrested its descent, broke through the surf and hauled it up the shallow beach, drove its two long iron teeth into the sand until I felt them bite knew the system would hold, the ship would not drift. Then I’d look up from the long vector of force my body had created and see you standing on the other end of the line. The anchor is like — like what? Like nothing I had even known before or would ever find after. I trust the sanity of my vessel, and if it sinks, it may as well be my own goddamn fault.
I go over to Emily’s apartment to watch her paint. The way she pushes wet color around a canvas makes me think of the east end of the island, the cliffs where you can watch the ocean shift and glitter a hundred feet below, each wave unfurling in a sweep of various blue.Emily is trying for a new color. She tells me she enters the blues through submergence, but she can only get to red by slicing something apart.
Emily has red hair. Audrey has blue eyes. Emily is falling in love with Audrey. Audrey is leaving soon for Northern Italy to restore Renaissance paintings. The Renaissance masters used egg yolk as the binding agent in their paint; egg yolk does not age well. Audrey studies color chemistry with a specialization in blue. For Valentine's day, Emily bought her Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. Emily wants
Audrey to stay. Emily wants the blues to survive. This is all to say there are lots of ways for color to break your heart.
Mitchell belonged, loosely, to the second generation of the New York School, although she seemed to have a propensity for abandoning her friends for lengthy intervals and escaping to western France. She lived on a sailboat in the Mediterranean for a while, which is how I know she knows first-hand what saltwater does with a sunset. She cared deeply for water, trees, dogs, poetry and music. She tried to paint not the landscape but the memory of it. “I could certainly never mirror nature,” she said once. “I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.”
The pleasure of a Mitchell painting is due largely to her reckless and even slutty affinity for color, what Maggie Nelson calls an “unstrained chromophilia.” She painted Harbormaster from her studio in Vétheuil, in 1957, during one of these protracted separations from her life in New York. At this point Michell had the money to buy more expensive, durable oils, but she preferred the gratifications of cheap paint, which was vivid and fierce if not very long-lasting.
It makes some critics suspicious. One reviewer, writing in the Times, felt that the immediate impact of encountering one of her canvases “is so immediately intoxicating that a natural reaction is to distrust the art.” The fear of beauty is a very old posture,Nelson retorts, which can be traced all the way back to Eve in Eden.
Most of the Abstract Expressionists had a signature critic, someone to justify their pictures in print, but no one ever wanted to be Mitchell’s interlocutor. Apparently there is a certain threshold after which beauty begins to refuse language. My journal from this year has only one entry for the month of May: When you were so happy to be alive that you forgot to write! The pen-ink is smeared as though I was running and writing at once, running out the door, running to meet you.
The woman was in her early thirties, a few years younger than you but still a decade older than me. Her name was something like Meg or Amy. Also a blonde, though shorter, the effects of age and an office job showing in her skin. She wore unfashionable shoes and makeup, which ran in the heat.
You met during one of our dozen days-long breakups. We can’t keep doing this, we’d say, then fuck, wrenchingly, one last time. Then I’d leave your apartment and drive back to my grandparents’ condo, slip back into bed and cry to Anna. Anna, Saint of
Patience. The desire was fed by its own denial. It was a quick tide; the separations never lasted more than a week.
In bed you’d remarked how sad it was that she was going back to the states soon and by the time you woke up she’d canceled her return flight. This happened often. The women came on girls’ trips, sorority reunions. They booked day trips on the charter boats and asked me to take photos of them lined up on the bow, their linked bodies dark against the blinding water. They’d flirt with the captain, the crew, slide their hands up your leg when you came over to refill their rum.
I liked imagining how they felt inside these moments: the late afternoon hour vibrant and sun-drunk; the men tanned and capable; the liquor melting all emptiness right out of them. Shoals of parrotfish flickered about the reef, scattering and reforming like brilliant clouds, each body working on the eye like the marks in a Seurat. The whole scene was radiant, and it made them radiant, too—how could they go back to Boston or Atlanta or Charlotte now, back to utility payments and Tinder and jobs in marketing, when they had swum pure glass and touched the face of god?
They’d wait around the boardwalk bars while we broke down the boat,buy you or Gabe or Guillermo a shot, fuck without a condom (vacation!) on the beaches and in the alleyways. They’d go home with a headache and a sunburn, maybe an absent period. But some would submit to the sirens and stay.
Anna and I had just decided to move out of the family condo and pay a more explicit kind of rent. Leeya had told us about an old property up on Lowry Hill, just past the gas station where I bought my cigarettes, a mediterranean-style villa that the owner was leasing out in parts while he renovated. We’d driven up in our rusting rental car and nearly cried when we saw the place, sun-washed white stucco and hand-painted tiles, both coastlines visible from the deck.
Afterwards Anna dropped me off in Christiansted, where I was meeting our friends for trivia night at the cay bar. Hope was sloshing around my chest, making my body as weightless on the cracked pavement as it was in the saltwater. I would run up to you at the bar and tell you that I was moving out and you would know that it was because of you, for you, that I was buying us out of secrecy, buying weeks or maybe even months of stability, precious stability.
Meg/Amy is sitting at the table when I arrive. She wears a large necklace and fake
nails. Her displacement in our crowd is so pronounced that I am instantly kind, because I work in tourism and maybe she tips well: where are you from, how long are you in town. She smiles and says she doesn’t know. I recognize the wave of fresh hope cresting within her. Maybe I’ll stay for a while. Maybe he is my real life now. Then you come back with two drinks and smile, put your arm around her. I smash my beer bottle on the table and lunge for your throat.
No; I smile back. It was so lovely to meet you. We play trivia on different teams and I am brilliant. I know everything, esoteric capitals and Fleetwood Mac lyrics and the first line of Moby Dick. The liquor and the private school tuition course through me like neon gas, lending my body a bright and vivid glow. I say witty things to make other men laugh loud enough for you to hear. The jealousy transfigures. I am the muse of all angry country songs. I am a character of myself, my personality clarified, my quips well-scripted.
There is something so cinematic about an angry woman. Mitchell’s temper was mythological. The critic Peter Schejeldhal writes about one night, one wine-soaked dinner party somewhere below 14th street.Joan’s ex-lover arrived uninvited and buzzed up, begging to talk. She opened the window, an easterly gale whipping up her short dark hair, and hurtled epithets down on the street like loose change. The man, pelted, went home alone.
You do not go home alone. The rage empties me out. Before you leave with her, I find you smoking at the beach, just beyond the bar lights.I walk beyond you and straight into the surf.I yell until you kiss me, the black water licking at our shins.
Berger says that art mediates between what is given and what is desired. The volume of essays that I bought second-hand has an inscription on the title page. Merry Christmas Tom! Love Always, Christina. I wonder if they are divorced now, or dead, or simply tired of John Berger. I wonder when the given and the desired were so irrevocably severed.
We drink dark wine and Emily tells me about the invention of painting. There was a young woman in ancient Greece. Her lover was leaving for a far-off war. He fell asleep against the wall in her kitchen; she traced the outline of his shadow in the firelight. He left in the morning and she went on about her life, passing her days in and about the kitchen—his outline keeping watch in the corner; his absence a distinct and pulsing shape.
There is a season to the grief, as with colds or certain weather. I know it’s set in when I see you in a stranger’s face on the C train at midnight. Daffodils for sale at the subway kiosk, very cheap and very yellow. Certain noise suits the clamor and certain noise clashes with it. On the subway, for instance, I can listen only to LCD Soundsystem and read only Renata Adler. Sometimes I can look at the sparse poems that some incredibly sincere and civic-minded MTA employee has thought to bolt to the wall under plexi-glass. Mostly I feel that I have irrevocably lost track of the plot and am hurtling back and forth beneath the city in some tepid effort to recover it.
Here I am in Brooklyn Heights. I call my grandfather. He tells me he can see the catamaran’s mast from where he sits on the condo porch, down on the island. I know that means it’s lunch-time and the anchor is down. Leeya is shouldering a cooler of frozen meat to the beach through waist-high surf.Seawater sloshes in and wets the burger buns. She is tan and winded and strong, white gold blazing against the blue, fording it. In Brooklyn the sun is out and the first daffodils are pushing up through the pavement. I am sitting on stone church steps remembering that winter doesn’t always exist.
On Saturday my girlfriends and I go to the ballet. Evening of an unseasonable winter day; the city center is dense with life and traffic. The ballet is doing Swan Lake. At the end of the story, the prince and the swan queen decide that death is preferable to separation and hurtle their birdlike bodies offstage to drown. But from where I sit in the nosebleeds the proscenium obscures the upstage plane, so that the whole thing concludes rather bloodlessly: the lovers embrace, then dance calmly off, out of my sight.
On Sunday, it rains. Matt and I go uptown to see the Alex Katz show at the Guggenheim. The show is called “Gathering,” after a line from a James Schuler poem, which is lettered on the gallery wall in neat black print. It ends: Past / is past. / I salute / that various field.
Matt and I like Alex Katz for the same reason we like walking Times Square at two in the morning, for the pleasures of a world reduced to shellacked panes of color. He lives in the center of Manhattan, right by the station at 57th street which is decorated on all sides by giant glossy Katzes. When I catch the early train home I always consider my reflection in these candy-colored mirrors. I look there like little more than a fragment of the city: one among the many, and rats.
Schulyer was another great New York Poet, friends with Mitchell and O’Hara. Mitchell borrowed one of his works, called “Daylight,” for a series of poem-paintings that she made in the nineties. And when I thought / “Our love might end” / the sun / went right on shining. She set the lyric in type on thick creamy paper and soaked all the surrounding space in yellow pastel; the yellow is as solar as the word “sun” in the poem, radiates and pulses accordingly. White space on a page is like time passing, the poet-fellow who has been assigned to edit this essay tells me. Maybe yellow space is time melting. The poet-fellow doesn’t seem to know.
“It’s difficult,” the professor says, speaking slowly at the lectern. He suffers from a condition that causes him to weep uncontrollably upon encounters with profound feeling and has chosen the hazardous field of Elizabethan tragedy. “Nobody wants to die at thirteen, but we do want to live intensely.”
The last dive you ever take me on we go deep off the wall, much farther down than I’m supposed to be, two hundred feet, maybe more. Only the wavelengths of certain blues can make it that far down the halocline. All other colors dissolve into the salt.
From that point below sea level, with a standard tank of air, you can only linger at the bottom for a moment before you have to start the long ascent up. It’s a delicate act, ascending: you have to swim quickly enough so as not to run out of oxygen, but slowly enough to keep nitrogen from foaming in the blood. It is not lost on me, what a fitting way this would be for us to die together. It was that kind of sex: sex that left you closer to death. We talked often about the end of our lives and did not feel sad.
My father has his own stories about the island. Not long after he married my mother they came down to visit. He went out drinking with my uncle and returned to the inlaws’ at dawn, only to find their wives up and weeping, expecting calamity—cars in ditches, bodies in the harbor. My grandfather, a strong-jawed man, barely forgave them. That same uncle killed himself a few years later. Which is all to say there was already an established family tradition of recklessness, ignoring the elders, entanglements with hard-drinking men coming to violent conclusions.
You told me that Guillermo saved your life once. It was right after you’d moved to the island and were sleeping at the marina, on a dry-docked sailboat that was cheaper than rent. Before you bought the truck you got everywhere by bike. You were coming home from the boardwalk one night too fucked up to see straight and had ridden right off the long concrete dock. Guillermo lived on a monohull that was moored
nearby. He woke to the splash and dove into the dark ocean, hauled your body back to the surface. The bike was never found. You said you’d owe him forever. It took a few years for me to realize that you are a sad drunk, not a careless one.
At the college party Lucy has three gin drinks and introduces me to her friend from out-of-town. This is Grace, she says. She’s been proposed to before. I understand that this is meant to mark me as alluring and well-lived. Instead I feel grotesque, like a freak and a fraud, selling you for the flickerings of intrigue in a stranger. I feel so much older than twenty-two, a relic in the warm and chatty room, something outside of time. Past is past. When I tell the story now I never mention that I said yes, and it wasn’t until we’d climbed out of the water and back onto the beach that the truth of things arrived, and you looked at me for a long time under the red night.Then it becomes a very different story, and no one likes it. No one laughs.
I’m in detention again with Stefan, truancy for me and disruption for him and we’re still being told how we have no shot at getting in to a good college if you two continue this, as if the police officer is going to write a letter to Arizona State University and tell them of my crime of skipping class on the first sunny day in February to walk in the park, and I’ll bat my eyes and tell Principal Walker how I won’t do anything like that ever again sir, as if I won’t hop the fence to the local high school tonight with eight of my favorite coworkers to chicken fight even though Jenna Parker and her boyfriend got caught just last week and nearly lost their scholarships, and Sian will joke, chlorine dripping onto her marble flooring, that maybe next time we can get drunker so the water isn’t as cold, as if both of us won’t nearly spit out her tequila but pretend like we enjoy the taste, as if next summer she won’t call and call to swear she’ll never come back to my side of the coast, as if we can still spend twelve hours in Jakab’s garage and maybe twelve more after because time isn’t yet something that carries an implication of ending, as if Dennis won’t be the one sent to drag me back because he’s the only one I’ll ever listen to, even if it means driving back home. Stefan is grinning at me, lopsided smile, and for a moment I forget that tomorrow I will experience what it’s like for boys who have only ever seen me as something to have sex with to call me a whore in every single class because I’m wearing fingertip-length shorts, and maybe I’ll pretend like it’s a funny joke, pretend they will get a quarter of the talking-to I got for my park-walk, as if I don’t hear them ask whose bedroom I’m spreading my legs in every time I wear a dress, as if I’m somehow a better person because I don’t get mad at the word slut, as if the fact that none of us have ever even done it before will stop the need for a teenage boy to believe the ability to subordinate others is what makes a man.
Stefan will tell me how it’s mainly my fault because he doesn’t have the vocabulary to say I’m sorry that happened yet,
and I’ll hate how he never apologizes until it’s six years down the line and my sister is telling me that he took LSD every day for a week straight, and when he stumbles into my dorm room with a diagnosis of insanity and sorry sorry sorry didn’t know where else to go the night that my first college boyfriend breaks up with me, I’ll finally understand what Mr. Walker meant when he said that no matter how hard you try you’ll never really escape your teenage years.
In the dark I dream only of bottomless mimosas. When I wake my neck is stiff, a sharp sideways pain like the grind of a screw rusted orange.I right my head and immediately lock eyes with a middle-aged man sitting across from me, too-tight-suit revealing the contour of a soju belly from nights downing pork grease and alcohol to satisfy his boss’s whims. He will do for today: my morning fixation. I make silent guesses at his salary, plugging in his approximate position on the corporate ladder, noting the price of his watch. My calculation is cut short when he notices my stare, breathes a curse through the corner of his mouth. But yes, I’m okay with this. Now. That’s the way things are here, I’ve been told. They will always stare at foreigners, but that does not give you license to stare back.
The train rattles to a stop and the man gets up, sways a little too close to me before getting off. Mutters something I can’t quite make out. If you were here I would simply tilt my ear towards your lips and you would translate for me. That pause as you choose your words; how I’d savor it. How I miss it now, so far from you, and so directional. I was never meant to travel this much alone. You could blunt any violence, love, and I would rather be at your mercy than everyone else’s. It is my three hundredth day on Line 2 and my Korean has not improved. If I ever get off, I swear to myself, I’ll go get some fucking lessons.
Fucking lessons, you joked when you first came over to my place. Lessons of fucking, about fucking, disguised as anything other than fucking. We were matched as language exchange partners at the library I worked at in Philly, and in place of pronouns, I offered my tongue. I would have given you my English directly if I could, if only, if only the wetness could coalesce into language in your mouth. I never cared for it anyway. My English, I mean. Language I do care about, and wetness. I never told you this but I had no interest in learning Korean before finding your name on the bulletin board.I just thought you were handsome. I’m no freak, and you made sure of this when we first talked. Are you one of those k-pop fans, you asked, and I was like no but what’s wrong with that, and you thought for a very long time because the expression was eluding you and because you never ever settled for Plan B, and finally you grasped it and said: because that is cringe.
I am reminded of this, the incongruity between that word and your serious face, as the train thunders through the dark Seoul underground, lethal and electric. My gaze
Jisoo Hope Yoon
snags on a girl, thick bangs, low ponytail, that floor-length puffy jacket everyone wears—all the locals, at least, and any foreigner who’s been here long enough to succumb to the ruthless winters. Student, I think, but then the cigarette in her hand. She’s twiddling it like a pen, and I understand then that she can’t wait another second to get off the train so she can sprint aboveground and light it. I know a thing or two about addicts. I eye her with a soft smile until the train screams to a stop, wishing her a hellish, perfect drag in the outside world I no longer have access to. But wait. She stands rooted in her spot as people squeeze past her and through the doors, shooting annoyed glances. Like she’s bound by something invisible. Like the doors may have well been closed, just for her. I spring to my feet in a moment of uncanny recognition: three hundred days and maybe my first companion, someone to share this purgatory with. She whips around. Girl. Me. Train. Girl says: 그쪽도나랑같죠?
Joanna, I tell her when she asks for my name. I caught her in her third escape attempt: she drifted into my car after missing her stop and the one after that. She sinks into the seat next to mine as I help her process her new predicament, acting as some sort of prison elder. I tell her not to bother looking for other exits, that I’ve tried everything already and she ought to preserve her energy. Walk all the way to the front, and the conductor will ignore you. Walk all the way to the back, and you will find no door. Try to grab one of those ‘in case of emergency’ hammers off the window and it will vanish in your hand, not to mention everyone will look at you weird, like you might be some deranged political protester about to delay their morning commute. The girl has a much harder time accepting her reality than I did when I first got stuck, and I struggle to understand why. She doesn’t have the look of an optimist; lacks those characteristic eyes which somehow reflect back a greater quantity of light than what entered them. No; I can see why she is here with me. Poor girl, she might never get another hit of nicotine for the rest of time.
I ask her for her name.In English, becauseI can already tell her English is better than my Korean, so why bother.
“진,” she tells me, “이진.”
“Like gin, the liquor.”
“No. 진.”
“Like chin,” I say, pointing to mine.
“It’s 진. J-i-n.”
“Oh,” I nod, pretending to understand, though gin and Jin sound exactly the same
and the whole ordeal seems to have been unnecessary. She reminds me of you. Not her English; hers is more textbook, yours more greased-up with that study-abroad money. No, it’s the methodical tenacity, the near-zero margin of error. The time you took me out to a family restaurant for our second date and you googled the nutritional information of every ingredient listed under every dish before making your choice. I looked up to the way you engineered your day. Thought that was what I had been missing my entire life: the ability to plan in advance. And I your perfect American girl, my spontaneity blue, sexual history blond. No matter how often you insisted otherwise, I know this to be true: you chose me, not the other way around.
Around Dangsan, the stop where Jin was supposed to get off to transfer to Line 9, she always gets a little restless, leaving our conversation midway just to pace or even to attempt another descent. This persists for weeks and I ask her about it when it gets annoying. Her final destination is Noryangjin, which I know holds the nation’s largest seafood market. What I didn’t know was that it is also home to thousands of young Koreans preparing for public service examinations, studying all year long to beat impossible odds and snag a coveted government job. The work is tedious and the pay low, but passing the exam means you’d never work past 6pm or get laid off in your lifetime. Which apparently is enough to attract hordes of twenty-somethings into cramped dormitory housing where they eat instant noodles twice a day and spend the rest of their waking hours swallowing information.
Jin tells me she has failed this exam six years in a row, her practiced monotone betraying no bitterness as she makes this confession. She has run her parents’ meager savings to the ground. They paid for a decent dormitory at first, free kimchi and free of roaches, but she was moved to a building higher up the Goshichon hill after twice not making the cut: the higher up the hill, the lower the rent, she explained. Last year, she settled for a semi-basement room practically on top of the hill, and her calf muscles have risen to the challenge. I give her a sympathetic look and she defensively tells me how competitive the exams are. “Like a needle hole,” she describes the odds, “like a hole in a needle which you use for sew. One person pass, nineteen fail.” Later, it turns out that the English portion of the exam is what held Jin back every time. It consists of grammar, vocabulary, reading, and ‘life English’. No listening, I note, and Jin deflects again, telling me how difficult the English portion is, with or without a listening section. It is everyone’s primary enemy, statistically the biggest reason why some enroll over and over again.
Again, Jin asks me when I finish telling her the story of my final destination. She wants to hear it again. I pause to consider. It’s not the contents of my story that are slippery but the order in which they must be told, the trembling finger which must eventually fall on a point of beginning, the pulse, the moment from which history propagates. So I oblige, tell Jin all about you and me, except I begin this iteration in our own half-basement in Sillim where we drowned in takeaway containers and rotting meat, the trash climbing over and eventually into your Gibson electric guitar, your last prized possession, something you believed in even as you lost faith in me. Is this what I moved here to do, I yelled at you. Lock myself in this tiny ass apartment getting fat with you. Then you yelled back that I was the one who had bought the ticket to Korea, that I chose to follow you here, that you were ready to leave everything American behind. Why didn’t I just let you go back? Why didn’t I let go? You screamed into my ear until I wasn’t sure which of us had originated the question. And like every other day, once we had torn our vocal cords raw, we ordered Chinese food and fucked as the motorcycle icon on your delivery app inched closer to our address, the only address, our beloved black hole of wicked rapture. And that’s why I was going to get off at Hongdae, I tell Jin, who is staring at me wide-eyed. I’m not sure whether her hyper-focus comes from needing to work twice as hard to parse the narrative from my English, or from sincere shock at the ugliness of my life. She asks why I was getting off at Hongdae when Sillim is halfway across town. I tell her my boyfriend had his first gig in two years at one of those indie clubs. I was on my way there. Until I got stuck here. I can sense she feels bad that I missed such a momentous occasion, and I’m quick to tell her it’s okay, he wasn’t going to show up anyway. I’m right, aren’t I? You were too far gone. A dream, like a second language, evaporating with such callous ease. I watched you let it go. (It could be said, of course, that I was eager to do this watching, that I had forsaken my own dreams the minute I boarded that flight.) Jin looks at me all confused, says I could easily find another boyfriend or a job here, being American. Oh my, she knows nothing. Says she really hopes I’ll get out of the train soon and find my way, that it must be within reach; she’s sure we’ve been given this time on the train for a reason. Oh my. What a nice girl.
∞
Nice girls don’t sit like that, a mother chides her daughter, who looks eight at most; those jelly sandals. Binaries are easiest on the foreigner's ear: nice and bad, girl and
boy, do and don’t. I prickle with the modest thrill of comprehension as the girl pulls in her knees from the manspread they were in. I wonder where they’re coming from. I’ve never seen a kid here so late at night, the train making its final counter-clockwise loop, which I can always identify for the number of inebriated college kids who stumble in out of breath, cheering when they make it on before the doors close. Those are the tame ones. The vicious drunks get on the first train of the day, their nasty, unhinged breaths waking us without fail around 5 in the morning.
Jin and I played a game today.We sat side-by-side in the corner so we’d have a full view of the car, making bets on which passengers would give up their seats when someone more visibly deserving of those seats got on. Pink shirt, I’d say, and Jin would parry, no, glasses.This is a world populated by clothing and not the people they contain. The little girl is jelly sandals, the mother counterfeit handbag. I am layers upon layers. Jin is all black, but now she shakes off her jacket to cushion her seat with it, preparing for sleep. She says, I am now here almost two months, so it is April outside maybe. It is April here, she corrects herself, and I admire that: her grip on the above-ground, the larger motions of its calendar. I count my exile day by identical day and never lose the number, repeating it to myself every night when I feel the first tide of sleep wash over my face. So close now to three hundred and sixty-five. So close and yet what would it change.The train rattles on, and when my eyelids drop their weights like clockwork, the last thing I see through my halfshuttered view is Jin sitting across from me, her and that row of seats tilting and tilting until I am returned to dark, that resting place where categories go to die.
To die without a name must be a luxury.Sometimes I take the pink seat on purpose, even when the car isn’t full, and feel my body mold itself to the name Imsanbu, Pregnant Woman. And I mean crayon pink. Ugly, that garish shade, and at least one per row: seats painted for women, potentially bearing life, potentially in need of exceptional protection. And me, in this place. I am exceptionally pale. Longlimbed too and fragile. Back home I was gangly, here I’m just slim; back home I was sickly, here my skin’s milk. There are places where pallor can be wielded like a power, and I may lack the violence to swing it around, but who could blame me if I held it, simply held it, like a shield.
Would you believe me if I told you I knew this would happen? I knew the moment you asked me to choose an English name for you, back in that library where I caught you studying English in the most dogged, witless way possible: two dictionaries sideby-side on your desk. Your real name was difficult to pronounce for your craft-beer-
drinking peers in that Master’s program, too many vowel combinations for their music theory brains.A name, like a nutritional label, a diagnosis. It was too much power for you to give away so readily. I took it like a bet. Began my silent catalog, things I could hold over you down the line if I wanted. I took you like a bet and I suppose I have wagered my life. I gave you a name I could eat.
I could eat an entire fried chicken, I tell Jin. The foods are conjured up with ease: being inexplicably shut into a train will do that to you. Topping Jin’s list is kimchi fried rice in a shallow pool of melted mozzarella. Topping mine is deep dish pizza, followed by butter chicken with garlic naan. Followed by Korean fried chicken, the sticky kind, which tops Popeyes, which is impressive. Or spicy tuna on crispy rice. Tamales with sour cream. Tiramisu. I’d even settle for dino nuggets, dipped in ketchup and mayo mixed 1:2. All these things you could probably find on the Cheesecake Factory menu. Except we’re not nearly hungry enough for the Cheesecake Factory or anything at all, our physical needs relegated to desires, extraneous luxuries. One side effect is that Jin seems to have beaten her nicotine addiction, and when I ask isn’t that a good thing, she just says no, I don’t feel like myself anymore.
In my next life I’ll worship an air fryer. That is, given this train will let us die, since it clearly won’t let us live. I must be going at least a little crazy because I don’t realize I said that out loud until Jin responds, yeah, or we will forever just … She trails off and draws circles in the air with her index finger. What does that mean? She explains we’re on the 순환선, the 순환 line. I ask again and she struggles to explain 순 환, she says like blood, like how blood goes around your body? Circulation, I offer, and she takes it. Line 2, the only circulation line of Seoul, the only one you could theoretically ride forever, go from Hongdae to Dangsan to Sillim only to find yourself right back at Hongdae.
∞
Hongdae is for young blood, you said when you first took me there. We had just arrived in Seoul, moist-skinned and bearing possibilities. I could have gotten a job teaching English to kindergarteners, you know I hate children but I would have done it, I would have done a lot for you then. It was you who said no. You were gonna make it big. You didn’t study in America for nothing. Street musicians boasted high notes and I folded my body into your arm as we wove through the crowd; I knew you
liked that. You said this was where you and all your artist buddies lived in your 20’s, shared two packs of ramen between five. What about your family, I asked, didn’t you ever eat with them? I heard Korea was a collectivist culture. You smirked and said didn’t you hear the news, we’re trying to be more like America. Everything that makes this country run lives below ground level. Even I know this much. I love the way you say my name. Jo-ah-na, sometimes Jo Anna, like it was always a Korean name, like I couldalways be a different person;all this requiring only the slightest re-orientation. We, too, could be different. I readily served as your conduit to the American experience and I believe there is a world where you do the perfect reverse for me here, if only I depended on you a little less, if only you hadn’t gotten me to start drinking with you, if only I hadn’t lied about liking your music, if only I hadn’t encouraged you to ignore your family’s calls, if only you hadn’t shoved that pizza box across the table and then said in disgust, why are you looking at me like I hit you or something. I cried until you felt bad and apologized, but of course I knew I could win every argument if I wanted to. We only fought in English. But if only we came from the same place to begin with. If only we were still in our twenties. Then maybe we would have lived the story we should have.
We should have worked harder, Jin says, and I’m not sure what she means. She’s got her hair scrunched higher than usual, this intense, disembodied stare scaring off whoever meets her eyes. She says she’s ashamed she’s been riding this train for so long without attempting more ways to get out, and my first instinct is to say then what does that make me, but instead I just repeat that I’ve tried everything already. She nods in sincere agreement but goes off to walk around the train anyway. When she returns, I spare her the embarrassment of having to recount her failure. I don’t say anything at all. She proposes we pass our time teaching each other our languages. It would help with her exam, and maybe it would help me adjust to this place without my boyfriend. I’m a little surprised Jin wants to give the exam another shot. She gets all quiet before telling me she was on her way back to Noryangjin to decide whether she would enroll for the seventh time, or, or, something else. Give up? I offer, and she won’t meet my eyes, mumbles: something like that. (She must have learned that expression from ‘life English’.) So why keep studying for an exam you might not take? She thinks for a minute before saying, I can keep working on something, even if it will never happen. It is more about what I do now.
I could never understand Jin: I was personally never so stupid, not even at twentyseven. But something has taken over the girl now. I see it, this itch to be understood.
She talks to me the whole day about growing up here, like I am a regular tourist who dropped her bags here yesterday, and I find this simple distance comforting. This is the land of six-year-old premeds. Where one in twenty live in complete isolation, never seeing daylight all year. Where the sun shines brighter each passing decade and throws the shadows into harsher relief. I learn about Jin’s childhood friend with a luxury brand obsession pulling her into debt, I learn about Jin’s mother, how she fell for an insurance scam at forty-five, I learn that Jin would frequently spend her budget on cigarettes over meals, and who am I to judge? No one, I am no one.
∞
No one belongs in transit, and certainly no one deserves to be here forever. But you could always be here if you wanted, like the hunchbacked retirees who do nothing all day but freeload. On Jin’s eightieth morning I know upon waking up that she is about to leave. When she stands up and announces she is ready to go, we are approaching Euljiro 3-ga. She decides to get off there instead of waiting for Dangsan. A drawn-out farewell is bound to be awkward, so instead she tells me Euljiro is the old part of town, and that she hasn’t been there since she was a student. As if this should console me. She hasn’t been anywhere other than Noryangjin and her parents’ home for six whole years. Joanna, she says, do you think time has passed out there, because if so I may have missed the enrollment deadline for this year. Obviously I don’t know the answer.
The last thing I ask Jin is what she said when we first met, that day when we were standing exactly as we are now, her at the doors, me at the pink seat. She said something in Korean and I couldn’t make it out. Jin tilts her head thinking, running her thoughts back back back, but the train brakes and screeches, and she doesn’t remember, and the doors are open, and the people flooding, and the exit, right there, gaping. Goodbye, Joanna, she says in perfect English, I wish I could take your place here sometimes so you could see the sun.
∞
The sunlight must come in, you insisted when we were looking for flats. I said it didn’t matter, I cared more about space and maybe a big closet we could convert into a recording booth for you. You dismissed my concern with a wave. People here avoid light their whole lives because they don’t want to tan, you said. But it’s the most important thing for a house. I said we don’t call these houses, they’re studio apartments, and you went on talking about how a house with lots of sun, it’s a sky-
and-ground difference. You mean the difference is night and day, I offered, and you just laughed and said well yes, the sun makes the difference between night and day. That time I chose not to clarify what I meant; thought that moment was better left beneath the surface. You held my face still laughing and said Joanna, Joanna, I can see you better in the sun.
My dear, to this day I wonder why it was I who got stuck and not you, here, a trail of light threading through a loop, this crochet project from hell. Are you still in our semi-basement ordering junk to your doorstep? Are you fucking some other girl, better yet a foreigner? Given the chance, I know I would not hesitate to take your place. I would readily trade tongues and trains with you, leave you here on Line 2; you can take my pink seat, the dreaming of mimosas, bottomless. I never aim to kill, but don’t you think it’s your turn to live in the dark.