Miles from Nowhere

by Nami Mun

  I hugged the panda.

  “He was smoking a cigarette. Probably one of mine.”

  I sat up on the edge of the couch and stopped the urge to touch him on his shoulder. “That’s really wrong,” I said. “You didn’t deserve that.”

  Right then a small pregnant girl came out wearing business clothes—a jacket, a blouse, a tent of skirt covering her enormous belly, and high heels that made her teeter. Her right eye was half-closed and bloodshot, and below it, on her cheek, was a huge bruise the size of a fist.

  “Hi,” she said, her voice sounding like soft bread.

  The guy got up quickly and hung his thick arm over her shoulders. “She just got called in for a job interview. Maybe you got something to cover up the . . .”

  “Right,” I said. “Right.”

  He gave her a smile and the girl tried to give one back but the swelling wouldn’t bend.

  I put the panda down and gathered my samples. “The light. It’s probably better in the bathroom,” I said quietly, as if lowering my voice would make the bruise hurt less. She went in first and I followed her, passing the guy without looking at him once.

  The light in the bathroom was a dirty orange and made everything—the towels, the Minnie Mouse shower curtain, the rubber ducky on the sink—seem rusted. The girl stood with her hands resting on the roof of her belly, looking at herself in the cabinet mirror with eyes deader than stones. It scared me to see her that big and that sad. On the toilet seat I set my case down, opened it up with a little trouble, reorganized the tiny bottles of foundation alphabetically and then by light to dark, as if it mattered. I imagined my stomach as big as hers while fumbling to open each sampler, trying to decide what shade to apply. I’d never cared before.

  “Baja Summer,” I whispered, and showed her the bottle before gently dabbing her cheekbone with a triangle sponge. Up close the bruise looked to be rotting. My hands shook. I asked her if it hurt but she said nothing. She was unreachable. She didn’t even wince. She just stared into those eyes of hers while I caked on layers of new skin.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said at some point.

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “Sure you are. You think you know something about me.”

  “I’m just concentrating.”

  “And him.”

  I poured more cream onto the sponge, taking more time than usual. “I know he’s the one doing the punching,” I said, finally.

  “Like I said. You don’t know anything.”

  “Fine. I don’t know anything.”

  “You’re stupid, just like the rest of them.”

  “Look,” I said calmly but could feel my throat knotting up. “I don’t know who or what you’re talking about but I’m not that stupid. I’ve done a lot of stupid things, and everything’s really fucked up right now, but that does not mean that he isn’t the one doing the punching, okay? Nothing you say can stop me from knowing that.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.” I threw my sponge into the sink and started packing. “And you know what, I don’t give a shit.”

  “We tried everything,” she said.

  “Well, I’ve tried everything, too, and I’m tired of trying.”

  “Knitting needles, clothes hangers. He’s even kicked me in the stomach.”

  I shut my sample case. I couldn’t listen.

  “It’s so big now,” she said. “It’s a big fat baby that won’t go away. Can you believe that?” The words popped out of her mouth. I wanted to tape her lips shut or rip my ears off.

  “You girls doing okay in there?” the guy called from the living room.

  She studied her face in the mirror. “You put too much on. I look like I’m melting.”

  I grabbed my case. I needed out.

  “He wasn’t trying to hurt me,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. “He just wanted to kill the baby. But it refuses to die.” She let go and grabbed some tissue. “Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard?” she asked, dabbing her nose, letting out either a laugh or a cry, I couldn’t tell.

  I suppose that was where I’d gotten the idea.

  That I should kill the baby before it got too big. Before it killed me. The fact that I could die while trying didn’t really factor into the decision. I shot up in the ferry bathroom that night. The need wasn’t something I could reason with, and I used up more than I should have, leaving me dry for the next day. But it was a good hit, nothing to be ashamed of.

  Afterward, I climbed the stairs to the upper deck, felt my way outside, and lay down on a bench so orange I wanted to drink it. The stars were out—all that silver, squinting in the dark, knowing exactly who they were and where their place was in the night. The regulars surrounded me, smoking, sipping, bobbing their heads to a guy playing guitar. I shut my eyes and saw the baby floating in my belly, just like the one I’d seen in a jar in sixth grade. It can breathe underwater, I thought, like some salamander. Wimpy was right after all. And it’s breakin’ my heart you’re leavin’—baby I’m grievin’. They all sang while the little one started crawling up and down my chest and stomach, her nails scraping my ribs in a way I didn’t like. Ooh, baby baby it’s a wild world . . . I rubbed my belly to find her, and then I punched her and punched again. She wouldn’t stop moving, so I kept hitting, with both fists, harder and harder, to the beat of the song.

  “Hey, you all right?”

  I snapped open my eyes. There was a hand on my shoulder and the hand belonged to a man sitting next to me. “I haven’t seen my mother in a long time,” I heard myself say. His face reminded me of a cat I’d found in the trash once.

  “None of us have,” he said, passing me a bottle.

  I took a pull so long the man snatched the pint back, pushed me away before scooting to the other end of the bench. I apologized. I told him my dog had just died. It just came out that way. I couldn’t have people knowing things about me but I wanted the right to be sad. The man didn’t hear or didn’t care. Neither did the bearded guy across from us. He’d stopped playing guitar to have a drink himself, and the cigarette he kept trapped between the strings went on smoking all by itself.

  I walked to the railing, stepped up onto the middle rung, and leaned over the edge, looking straight down at the white water ribbons the ferry left behind. The engine revved and the wind sprayed water onto my face and neck. I felt cleaner than I’d felt in a long time. The river was going to rinse my baby away. Rinse the baby and make me simple again.

  Falling was easy.

  When I hit the water, I did not hold my breath. I didn’t move and I wasn’t afraid. Opening my eyes and opening my mouth, I drank through every part of my body, wanting to stay down for as long as possible. I thought of the baby inside me, and me inside my mother, as the string of water ran between my ears, behind my eyes, and inside my heart and lungs. This is what it feels like to be filled with love, I thought. Pure, meaningless love.

  Did I do right? I asked.

  Absolutely, she said. You gave your true self to God and He gave His true answer. Needles spiked my arm. A scratchy blanket covered me from the breast down. Stiff, plastic tubes sprayed cold air up my nose, drying out the back of my mouth. I woke up in a hospital room that smelled of pennies. I was cold. I was beeping. The baby was dead but they couldn’t see. The doctor, the nurse, the policeman all had enormous eyes but they couldn’t see. Leaning too close over my face, all they did was ask stupid questions. You fall in or did you mean to do it? Is there anyone we can call? Can you tell us your name? What’s your name?

  I closed my eyes and sang, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.

  Frank

  The meeting was held in an elementary school, in a classroom with a snake tank and green penmanship placards above a blackboard. I sat in the back row, on a foldout chair under a hanging globe, and listened to a mustached man share how he’d been introduced to heroin during a tour in Vietnam. After him was a stockbroker who’d t
raded his wife and kids for his love of crack, followed by a stage actor who was handed the worst role of his life—as a crystal meth junkie.

  “Such bullshit,” someone whispered.

  Three empty seats to my left, a guy sat hunched forward with elbows on knees, shaking his head.

  “Absolute bullshit,” he said again, and I was sure that this time he’d said it for my benefit.

  “What?” I whispered back.

  He slid over to the seat next to me and spoke louder even though we were now much closer. “How come everybody was a fucking hero before they found crank? How come every asshole who goes up there had a shitload of money, a perfect job and a perfect wife and a two-car garage before he lost it all to base?” He moved his hands too much when he talked, and I thought he might smack me by accident. “Sacks of dog shit. Just once I want somebody to go up there and say, hey, you know what? I was a fucking asshole before I slammed shit up my arms, and guess what, I’m still a fucking asshole.”

  A few heads turned to judge us.

  “I’m Frank, by the way.” He leaned back, stretched his legs, and spread his arm across the back of my chair. “I’m an addict and an alcoholic.”

  During break, Frank and I smoked outside in the schoolyard, by the jungle gym, away from the others. From there, we could see the double doors that opened to the yard, the hallway, the people congregating by the refreshment table. The sun was falling, giving its last bit of life to the telephone wires above us.

  “So, what’s your poison?” Frank asked, lighting up two cigarettes.

  “Heroin mostly, and some other stuff.”

  “Wanna know mine?” He passed me a smoke. “Sobriety. It’s fucking killing me. I can’t take all the bullshit. They got it backwards. All these con artists.” He flapped a hand toward the school. “When I was high, that was the real me.”

  Everything about Frank moved too much. His eyes, the size of gumballs, rattled when he talked. His right hand shuttled his cigarette to and from his mouth, while the left kept scrubbing the top of his thinning scalp. He paced. He spat. He shifted his weight, sometimes perching a foot on the jungle gym railing, sometimes rocking side to side, with his arms crossed. He was the opposite of me. I could hardly move. All I wanted was to unfeel and unthink, a phase my counselor hoped I’d get past.

  “Four hundred and sixty-two days,” Frank blurted, tapping the breast pocket of his black leather jacket.

  It took me a second to figure out he was tapping his sobriety chip. “That’s a lot of days,” I said.

  “Means nothing. That’s just how long I’ve been fooling myself. I still got some drinking left in me. Drinking, fucking, snorting, smoking—all that. I know it, they know it. Shit, even you probably know it.”

  I smiled. “If you say so.”

  “How about you. You think you’re done?”

  I glanced at the back of my hand, the tiny scab above my ring finger, and told him I was.

  Frank threw his head back and laughed, the cave of his mouth stretching wide before shrinking into coughs. When he finally calmed down, he rubbed his chest and said, “Trust me, sweetheart, you’re not even close to being done.”

  “Thank God,” I said, which sent him rolling again. I laughed, too, and tried to calculate how much of my response was based on truth. I didn’t mind Frank’s prediction of my failure. The people at the hospital clinic—my counselor, the nurses, the social workers—showed too much hope for me. It was in the way they smiled when watching me swallow my cup of pills, the way they spoke softly when I showed even a grain of emotion. I didn’t know what to do with all their hope. It surrounded my head. It sealed my face and suffocated. Hope was based on the unknown, and I liked knowing things. Like that I was going to fail. Failure had better odds. You could depend on it. So when Frank said with absolute certainty that I had more using left in me, I couldn’t help but feel relieved. Maybe even happy.

  By the middle of his second cigarette he told me how he’d dropped out of night school to work as a mechanic but somehow ended up in jail for destruction of personal property.

  “It started with a chicken suit,” he said.

  “You destroyed a chicken suit?”

  “No. I bought a chicken suit. And I put it on because I was trying to win back a girl.”

  “In a chicken suit.”

  “You wanna tell the story?” he asked, his hand gesturing to an invisible microphone between us. He was angry. His voice got louder, his eyes bulged, and his veins made a tree on his neck, but his anger didn’t frighten me like my father’s. I told him I was sorry and asked him to go on.

  “It’s okay, I just have to tell it all at once or the story gets messed up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So I put on this thing and drive half an hour to get to this girl’s apartment. It’s like midnight, and she’s not there, so I grab her spare key from under her mat and let myself in.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “Like who?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I thought maybe a neighbor might’ve seen you.”

  “How the fuck should I know? Nobody saw nothing, okay?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus, will you stop apologizing? Just let me tell the story, okay?”

  “You’re right,” I said, and could feel myself slipping back into a familiar role—listening to others, swirling in their stories, touching and breathing in their lives so I didn’t have to be in mine. At least, that was what my counselor had told me.

  “Anyway. Like I was saying, I go into her place, and right away I see she’s living with some fucker. There’s two toothbrushes, two bathrobes, and his is made of velvet. I mean, who the fuck does he think he is, Telly Savalas?”

  “Velvet’s kind of creepy,” I said, to show I was on his side.

  “So I get depressed, seeing all his shit there, and I just start raiding their cabinets looking for booze. This was my fifth time falling off the wagon and I start drinking everything—rum, peach schnapps, sambuca, Grand Marnier, whatever—and I’m getting really fucked up. Then, all of a sudden, I gotta take a piss.”

  “It makes sense.”

  “But I’m in the chicken suit. And I can’t reach the zipper—my neighbor had to zip me up, remember?”

  He hadn’t mentioned that part but I let it go.

  “I gotta take a leak so bad but I don’t wanna piss all over myself, so I grab a knife from the kitchen and cut a hole in the costume, near my dick. And I’m slicing and slicing and the piss is about to come up my throat it’s so bad. By the time I get my dick out, I just start pissing all over the kitchen floor.”

  I made a face but Frank didn’t see because all he saw was the inside of his story.

  “And it feels so good. Then I start thinking, hey, maybe it feels good because I’m pissing on their linoleum. So I walk over to the couch.”

  “No.”

  “You got it. All over their couch, their pillows, their fucking bathroom mat, their hand towels. When I run out of piss, I drink more and wait and piss all over his business suits, their bed. I even piss into her shampoo bottle.”

  “Now, that’s going too far,” I half-joked, but Frank said, “Yeah, maybe,” and considered it seriously.

  “Anyway, after all that, I need a smoke, so I go out to the backyard.”

  “Why didn’t you just smoke in the apartment?”

  “Josie hated the smell of cigarettes. I didn’t wanna be rude. Plus, I was burning up in that getup. I needed some air. So I’m sitting in her backyard, on this picnic table she shares with some neighbor upstairs, and I’m smoking and drinking, and who knows what fucked-up things are going on in my head, but I start thinking that the neighbor’s porch light is bugging the shit out of me. It’s so damn bright.”

  “Lightbulbs are funny that way.”

  “So I climb the neighbor’s back porch stairs, and the wood, it creaks like some animal. But I get to the landing and I unscrew the lightbulb.” Frank fired up a
nother cigarette and pushed the smoke out his nose. “Five minutes later, the cops are slamming my face on the grass and trying to cuff my chicken wrists.”

  “You got arrested for unscrewing a lightbulb?”

  “Think about it,” he said, tapping his temple. “You’re a girl and you’re sleeping alone. You hear somebody climbing up your stairs and so you get up, you go to the kitchen, and all you see out your back porch door is a shadow of a giant bird, reaching up and unscrewing your fucking lightbulb.” He cleared his throat and spit. “God, that poor woman. She must’ve lost her throat screaming.”

  “What about your girl?”

  “She told the cops everything. About all the piss. She thought having the entire neighborhood watch me get arrested in a chicken suit wasn’t embarrassing enough.” Frank took a drag and the smoke scaled up his face and to the sky. It was dark now. Winter was coming. “I know what I did was really fucked up but I tell you what, I’ve never felt closer to the truth until that day. Whatever was flowing through my body that night—that was real. That anger was so fucking clean—I mean, when I was pissing all over their stuff, that was the single most honest moment I’ve ever lived in my life. That was me. The real me. My life right now, it’s just all bullshit.”

  The meeting officers were herding people back into the classroom. Frank pitched his cigarette and headed in the opposite direction, toward the schoolyard gate. “C’mon, let’s get the fuck outta here and get a drink.”

  His leaving surprised me. Sure, he had seemed frustrated, but I thought most of it was for show, as in, sobriety sucks but it’s better than going to jail kind of thing. The ground felt suddenly uneven, as if the earth had tilted toward Frank, coaxing me to take that first step so the weight of my body and simple physics could make the decision for me. But I wasn’t moving. I wondered if all that hospital hope had something to do with it. In any case, I didn’t follow Frank, and it took a while for him to notice.