by Nami Mun
“I think I’m going to stick around,” I whispered, but the sky was clear and my voice traveled far.
He slowed and then came to a stop. With hands shoved in his pockets, he kicked the toe of his sneaker into the pavement as if wanting to dig through. “They’re trying to sell us a god that don’t exist. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.” I searched to say something really important but came up empty. “But I really like the sugar cookies.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me.” He stared at the school entrance for a while as if its long hallway, now a fluorescent green, contained some dream he knew the ending of. “Fine,” he said, finally, and stomped toward me. “Let’s go hear some more bullshit so you can get your sugar cookies.”
I gave him a little push and I could tell he liked it.
Right before we entered the classroom Frank asked if I had a sponsor.
I told him I didn’t.
“Good,” he said, patting me on my back. “I really wanna be there for you when you fall.”
King’s Manor
I sat on the park bench next to Ray, who was missing a leg. Winter was falling on us, on the shoulders of his faded army jacket, the metal rims of his wheelchair, the folded New York Yankees blanket covering his stump. Pushing his bare foot against the sidewalk, he rolled closer to the pigeons pecking at the snow. He couldn’t wear shoes because his foot was too swollen, the skin around it tight and flaking. I wanted to slice it open for him, to let the pressure out. I wanted to free his veins.
I’d stopped shooting up and was working at a small nursing home. Except for my first name, I lied about everything on the job application. Nobody at work knew the real me, including Ray, the only person I ever talked to, though never about my past. He was a patient. He didn’t have any family.
“You want one?” he asked, shaking his cigarette pack so a filter shot up. I took it. He caped a side of his jacket over his face to shield the flame from the wind. I lit mine off his. Most of his teeth were gone. When he took a drag, his lips curled into his mouth.
“They’re cutting it off this week,” he said, tossing crumbs to the birds by his foot.
I feigned ignorance, a new talent of mine.
He patted his good leg. “The blister’s gone bad and the infection’s spreading.” He coughed and spat, turning his head away from me and the birds. “They’re letting me keep the knee this time, though.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Knees are good.”
Somewhere far away a small dog was barking. Ray didn’t blink. He let the tears fill his eyes. I wished he would cry, really loud, just so both of us could get past wondering whether he was going to or not.
“Now one’s going to be shorter than the other.” He wiped his nose on his wrist.
I wanted to tell him not to worry about that because his legs weren’t the same length to begin with since one was a stump, but I couldn’t think of a way to say it without sounding cruel or stupid.
“I still miss the other one. Ten years and it still itches sometimes.”
“I know,” I said.
“Is that so?” He glanced at me sideways, his sarcasm pinching the corners of his mouth.
“Where do you feel it?” I asked, feeling the need to make up for something.
He pointed his cigarette down at his invisible calf. “Drives me nuts. Can you imagine having an itch you can never scratch?”
I was about to say yes but thought better of it and told him no.
“Well, try. Just try and imagine it.”
“Okay.”
A little later I said, “Sometimes I feel an itch deep in my ears but I can’t get to it.”
He tossed his cigarette over the birds. “Yup,” he said. “It’s just like that, only now take away the head.”
We sat in that Sunday quiet. Morning service would start soon. As an assistant to the activities coordinator, I was in charge of transporting patients into the chapel without incident. I told Ray we should get back.
“Just a little longer.” He closed his eyes to the shredding sky, letting the snow make a veil of his face.
An orderly walking to work stopped to say hi. He said his name was Benny and that he was new. Ray stayed in his trance.
“Is he alive?” Benny asked, scrunching his brows. Benny had brown hair and cold, bluish skin, which made me think he should be wearing a hat and something thicker than his uniform scrubs. Stamped on the thigh of his pants was King s Manor—a tiny hole having eaten up the apostrophe. “Guess I’ll see you in there,” he said, hugging himself, giving me a smile that seemed too intimate. For years I would follow that smile without understanding what any of it meant, but I didn’t know it then.
When Benny left, I turned to Ray. He still faced the sky, his eyes closed to the world. I crouched down and put his sock back on.
“Hey, Joon?”
“Yeah?”
He rolled up his bag of crumbs and tucked it inside his jacket. “Will you come to the hospital when they cut it off?”
A snow truck drove past, the noise of it silencing everything else. I told Ray I would go with him even though I knew I wouldn’t. I prayed for him to hear the lie in my voice. Everything and everyone had to be thrown away—heroin dreams and alcohol and all the strays I’d met living as a runaway—so I could get a fresh start. And now I was clean but empty. I had nothing left to give. To Ray, or to anyone.
As I wheeled him back, he told me the date and time of the amputation, and I nodded, wondering what the doctors did with all those detached body parts.
That night I went home and put a plastic grocery bag over my head. I wanted to see what the head felt like, separate from my body. I cinched the bag tight around my neck and lay down without letting go of my grip. With my every breath the white plastic bag crinkled in and out, making too much noise, and the bare bulb hanging above me seemed foggy. My face turned damp. My breath smelled exactly like what I’d eaten for lunch—a bowl of instant noodles, a pickle. I tightened the grip on the bag, and eventually my breathing slowed, enough for me to sense a layer of mist licking my eyes. The plastic barely crinkled. Slowly my head began disremembering the body, sloughing it off gently, until all I could feel was my now-giant skull and my one arm, still strangling the bag. It was quiet. And then too quiet. That’s when they came to me. My mother, Knowledge, Wink, Blue, and even my father. They all wedged their faces into the plastic bag, flattening my skin and folding my ears, and used up all the extra air to tell me that I deserved to be lonely, that I was selfish for having left them behind.
I snatched the bag off, gagging. I’d lasted about five minutes. After a rest, I tried again but didn’t last as long. I felt dizzy. The back of my head tingled and sparked the proverbs my new sponsor had spoken. Make amends to make progress. Repair the foundation and build a better life. Frank’s using again, my sponsor told me, biting into an empanada that stained his fingers. That man’s running out of lives, he said.
When the pay phone rang it startled me. I slid out from my sleeping bag, walked to the other end of my studio, and stared at it, face-to-face, as it continued to ring. A leftover from when the place used to be a newsstand and candy store, the black phone was covered in OTB stickers and silver graffiti, except on the shiny metal faceplate that warped my nose. I didn’t know its number, so I decided that the call couldn’t be for me. After ringing sixteen more times, the person on the other end finally gave up. The rings left an echo. It dawned on me then that people left echoes. Without thinking, I dropped two dimes and punched seven random buttons. No longer in service, the recording said. The White Pages, bound in a black binder, dangled below the phone. I opened to a page and picked a number without reading the name beside it.
“This better be Kilduff,” a man said right away.
I hung up. I grabbed more dimes and called another number, and then another, feeling braver with each connection. I looked to see if my father was listed. He was. He picked up in three rings.
“
Hello?” he answered in Korean. I breathed quietly, ran my finger over three initials carved on the side of the phone. “Hello,” he said again, this time slower, as if he were scared of me.
I hung up.
His “hello” stayed with me for a while and faded, like the sunburned shapes behind closed eyes. And then I was alone again. I thought I could hear a hiss rising from my concrete floor. It was my sponsor again. Being alone is like being with the last person you got high with. Get out of the house.
Following his sound advice, I left my place and went to a neighborhood bar with a neon dartboard on the window. I drank shots of gin, the first taste of liquor in months, and the more I drank, the more I was convinced that alcohol was not the problem. By the third round, a guy came up and told me I was pretty. I’d seen him in the corner, playing darts by himself and taking breaks only to slip coins into the jukebox. He bought me Long Island iced teas and we talked about things like the crappy weather and drink prices being too high and how his wife had left him for their kid’s karate instructor. He himself was a bagel maker. The secret ingredient, he said, was New York tap water. I told him that it didn’t sound much like a secret, but by then our eyes were floating in alcohol and nothing mattered.
“You’re lonely,” I said, like a fact.
He waved the bartender over. “I’ve been called worse.”
He had acne scars, the kind so deep you thought they might still hurt. I wanted to touch them, and he said I could. His cheek was smoother than I had thought. Like a craggy bar of soap. After last call we stumbled through the snow to his car and I let him eat me in the backseat.
On Thursdays we had Sports Hour at King’s Manor. Whether they wanted to play or not, patients were gathered into the cafeteria for a game of chair volleyball.
I was pushing two chairs at once—Harold on the left, Laney on the right. They were nothing but bones in hospital gowns but it took all the strength in me to wheel them straight. My hangover felt ugly and beautiful, the pain keeping me alive.
Benny ran up to me in the hallway. “You need a hand?” he asked, and grabbed one of the handgrips.
“I can manage,” I mumbled, and sped up, not wanting to talk to anyone.
“Yeah, but I’m right here.” He took Laney’s chair and immediately she started humming a song, her index finger conducting an imaginary orchestra. Benny and I walked side by side, his steps matching mine, even though he was tall and lanky. When we turned a corner, he said, “I’ve seen you before, you know.”
As soon as he said this I remembered from where.
“Thursday nights? The church basement meetings?” He grinned. “Don’t think I can’t see you sitting in the back, shoving cookies into your pockets.”
I stopped.
Benny stopped his chair, too. “What’d I do?”
I wanted to tell him that my favorite part about Narcotics Anonymous was that I could actually be anonymous. Nobody needed to know who I was before, or who I was now. But to make a scene about this at work seemed like I’d be exposing myself even more, so I said, “Nothing,” and started pushing again, maybe a little too fast.
Benny looked straight ahead. “I’m not coming on to you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not.”
“Some people might say that you’re hitting on me.”
We reached the cafeteria and I pulled over. “I can take it from here.”
“And who could blame you? I’m the only straight guy here who’s not wearing a respirator.”
I waited for him to let go of Laney’s chair.
Hands up in surrender, he stepped back. “You could at least laugh at my jokes.”
“I’m laughing on the inside,” I said, pretending to work the brakes on the chairs.
“Wow. You just made a joke.” He smiled, turned on his heels, and glided down the hall as if a Gene Kelly tune was humming in his head. When he stopped to push the elevator call button, he caught me looking at him. I ducked into the cafeteria.
“Congratulations, Miss Joon.” My boss was applauding me. “You are officially the slowest assistant I’ve ever had in my seven years at King’s Manor.”
He had already shoved the dining tables against the walls, except for the back wall, which was taken up by a vending machine and a double-wide door that would open up to a courtyard if it weren’t winter. Heavy chains looped around the door’s handles now. One glance at the patients and anyone could see that the chains were overkill.
The cafeteria was the most decorated room in the facility but somehow the trimmings, with their bold colors and their sheer demand for cheerfulness, made the room, and the people within it, depressing. We were approaching February and the walls were now taped up with giant-sized hearts, little nudes carrying bows and arrows, and gold and red letters that linked up to read, HAPPY VALENTINES DAY HAPPY VALENTINES DAY.
The patients were clustered in the center of the room.
“Now, I want them divided evenly this time,” my boss ordered. “Three rows of four on one side of the room, facing the three rows on the other. And can you do something about—” He stopped mid-sentence and gestured for me to wipe off Harold’s chin. Harold sat in the center of the cluster, still dozing in his wheelchair. His head slumped to one side, in the same direction as his spittle, and I used the end of my shirt to clean it off. Sleep is the sister of death, Knowledge had said to me once, but Harold looked happy sleeping, much happier than the others, who sat with their hands dead on their laps, their milky eyes staring off into some past or at the dust particles running circles around them. They were all deflated balloons, waiting for someone—a parent, a child, anyone—to claim them again.
After I finished making the rows, my boss stood poised in the center of the aisle, clutching a whistle in one hand, a beach ball in the other. Without any warning, he blew the whistle and tossed the ball high in the air, fully expecting the patients to jump and fight for possession. The ball made a ting by Harold’s feet. My boss clapped his hands. “C’mon, Harry, let’s look alive!”
After Sports Hour I sat behind the nurses’ counter, cleaning, buffing, spit-shining everything on the desk: color-coded file folders, a coffee mug filled with pens, a box of Kleenex, a PA system with a microphone. There were photos of children, mostly Filipino, trapped between the desk and its glass top. I shined that, too.
“Did you hear about Myrna in 103?”
I hadn’t heard Enrique walking up. He was a vocational nurse who loved to talk about phosphate enemas. He spoke of them in surgical detail and went so far as to describe all the different sounds the patients and their bodies made. I usually avoided him, especially during meal breaks.
“Well, did you?” he asked, sitting and crossing his legs on a stool beside me.
I knew Myrna had died but didn’t want to encourage him.
“She was so blocked up. It was awful.” Catching his reflection on the lobby door, Enrique mussed up his hair only to smooth it back down. “I even called all three daughters. Not one of those bitches called me back.” He splayed his fingers against his chest. “What a way to go. Alone and constipated. Which reminds me.” Enrique spun around on the stool. “Guess what I saw today. Go ahead, guess.”
“No.” I yanked out a tissue, spit into it, and started polishing the PA system.
“You and the new boy, strolling down the hall together, all romantic.”
“We were pushing chairs.”
“Well, I thought it was sweet.”
“That’s because you’re single.”
“Speak of the devil . . .”
Benny came up to the counter and I almost knocked over the microphone. He and Enrique exchanged hellos and I focused on rearranging the folders on the desk, nudging the piles so the edges lined up.
“I apologize for her rude silence,” Enrique said, getting up to leave. “She was raised by a pack of mimes.”
I peered over the counter. Crouching behind Benny, Enrique acted out a lively conversation using
his hands as puppets—his way of urging me to talk. When Benny turned around, Enrique took off, saying bye again.
Even with the counter between us, I could smell on Benny something familiar, a mixture of sweat and shoe polish. I spritzed Windex on the desk, feeling okay with the silence.
“Can I borrow a pen?”
I plucked one out from the coffee mug and handed it to him.
“Thanks.” He started drumming the counter with the pen and a finger. “Hey, I saw your schedule for tonight.”
I buffed the head of the microphone as if it contained every germ in the world and pulled out hair strands that were coiled around the toggle switch. After that, I stooped under the desk to wipe down the file cabinet.
“Me, too,” Benny said.
I looked up. “What?”
He folded his arms and then unfolded them. “You’re getting off tonight at six, and I’m saying, me too. And since we live so close to each other we could—”
I stood up. “How do you know where I live?”
“I told you. I live across the street. I saw you going into your place once.” He lodged the pen back into the mug. “Great. Now you think I’m stalking you.”
“You’re at my meetings and you live across the street from me and that’s a coincidence?”
Some months later I would find out that nothing was a coincidence—that Benny and I were supposed to be together the way leaves are supposed to fall. A nurse walked by with two stethoscopes choked around her neck. I had said too much. Turning my back to Benny, I began organizing the shelves overflowing with tapes of classical music, magazines, and patient-birthday reminder cards for forgetful families.
“Hey, Joon,” Ray said, wheeling by. “You’re still coming with me tomorrow, right?”
I half nodded. I watched him roll down the long hallway. At night, under the fluorescents, the floors shined like ice, making me want to take off my shoes and skate the entire place on my socks.
“I’m still standing here,” Benny said. He had brown liquid eyes. “So you want to go to the meeting or what?”