by Nami Mun
“I thought you did that with salt,” I said.
She clapped her hands clean. “Why take a chance.”
“You hit the poor fuck with this?” Henry asked, still eyeing the silver blade.
“Just missed his ear. I killed the lampshade, though.”
Henry laughed and looked to his buddies. “Little girls trying to whack their daddies. Ain’t this a special time we’re living in.”
Tati’s face changed. “I have an idea. Why don’t you go give my dad a good fuck if you feel so bad for him.”
Henry waved her away and went back to his pals without noticing the hurt in her voice. Or maybe he didn’t care. Tati knocked on the counter three times before tucking her blade back into her pocket.
“You must really love Vinh,” I said.
“Till the day I die,” she said right away. “Till the day I die.”
It hit me then that Tati—who acted so tough, who carried a knife and had a tattoo of a bleeding rose on the palm of her hand—was more innocent than I was, at least about love. Using the thin red straws as chopsticks, she scooped whipped cream into her mouth.
“I gotta make a call,” she said, and hopped off the stool. She headed toward the back of the bar but paused in mid step. “Ah, fuck it,” she said, and sat back down. She knocked wood three times again.
“You gain some weight?” she asked, patting my waist.
“No,” I said, and took off a sweater.
“How many you got under there?”
I told her that I’d left Benny.
She slammed her hand on the counter, almost scaring me. “About fucking time,” she hollered.
“I’m thinking of going back,” I said. “You know, make him come to NA meetings with me.”
She shook her head and took a drink. “You’ve said smarter things, little girl. Dating an addict when you’re trying to quit has to be the stupidest thing.”
Right up there with throwing a knife at your own father, I was tempted to say, but I knew it would hurt her feelings. I raised my glass to my lips only to find it empty.
“Maybe I can set you up with one of Vinh’s friends,” she said.
“Maybe you can buy me a drink,” I said, and she did, after putting out an acorn for me.
By late afternoon, enough men had walked into O’Brien’s to fill up every seat at the bar. They laughed and argued about football scores, whined about the rain, parking tickets, and the number 12 bus, which ran slower than Jimmy the retard, and oh shit, the old lady wants to celebrate another anniversary. Tati and I kept to ourselves at the end of the bar and drank like old men. We talked about our favorite songs and compared special names we were called in school for being Oriental. Chink. Gook. Chinky-chinky-ching-chong. She recounted all the bloody noses she’d handed out because of the teasing, and I imagined her beating up some of my own tormentors. But for the most part we talked about our dreams, like they really belonged to us, and as we drank, our imagined futures seemed as real and beautiful as the alcohol in our spines. I wanted a place of my own, with a mailbox and a toaster, but was too embarrassed to want something as ridiculous as love. She wanted money and to be a kindergarten teacher.
“You mean, like with kids?”
“What’s the problem?” She looked hurt but sounded angry.
“Nothing. I’m just surprised.”
“Hey.” She punched my shoulder. “Look at me when you say that. Just because I’m a bitch doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings,” she said, and knocked wood again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But, you know . . .”
“What?”
I took a swig. “Your boyfriend’s in a gang and you almost stabbed your father.”
“That’s right,” she said, and held up an index finger. “Almost.” Tati then shot up from her seat, saying she had to call Vinh. She straightened her skirt and walked toward the back. Before she could reach the hallway where the phone was, someone put a hand on her arm. It was the old man, the one with the dog in the basket. Henry was crouched behind the bar, changing a keg.
“Have you seen my Mary?” the old man asked, and without missing a beat, Tati pulled out a bill from her pocket and tucked it into the man’s hand. “Take care of yourself, okay?” she said, and smoothed the dog’s head before walking off. The old man stared at the money in his palm like he was waiting for it to speak.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me. You again!” Henry screamed louder than I’d ever heard him, but my eyes stayed with Tati and her commanding stride toward the pay phone. Her love for Vinh seemed so simple, so determined. It burned me to watch her drop coins into the slot and press numbers she knew by heart. I thought about calling the motel. The pay phone there was by the manager’s room, about three doors down from ours. Benny wouldn’t hear it. At least not with the TV on. Plus, what would I say to him?
O’Brien’s was busy now. The nighttime crowd had blown a canopy of smoke over the bar, over balding heads, curly heads, capped heads, and red heads. I noticed a guy. He was taller than the rest, his arms were titanic, and he looked like he ate bricks for breakfast. Nothing about him reminded me of Benny. He shot me a grin and I shot one back and slinked up to him, carefully anchoring one foot in front of the other. Then with all the sex in my voice, I placed a hand on his chest and asked if he wanted to buy me a drink.
He laughed and then I laughed, but then he laughed longer. “You’re not exactly my type,” he said, his eyes connecting with the eyes of his buddies.
I must’ve looked confused because he then said, “Your chest is too flat. You’re not my type, okay?”
“Jesus, Joe. That’s a little harsh,” his friend said.
“Hey, I’m just being honest,” the guy said, and they continued to discuss the value of honesty as though I weren’t there.
I went back to my seat. My face felt gigantic. I wanted Tati to return so I wouldn’t look so alone. Without thinking, and without looking at the guy, I played with Tati’s rabbit’s foot, stroking the creamy white fur with the back of my hand until I felt a distinct toenail. The foot was real—it had once been on a real rabbit. I pushed it away, but then took hold of it again, hoping that the creepy shiver running down my neck would maybe push out all other feelings. Tati returned. She grabbed the foot back.
“What took you so long?”
She stared silently at the sloping tower of pint glasses in front of us and rubbed her rabbit’s foot as if trying to nurse it back to life. I asked if she was okay. She said she was, and to prove it, she ordered us another round. And I kept drinking because Tati kept buying and it was dark out now and Benny would be fucking.
“Fuck Benny,” I said at some point in the night, holding up my scotch.
“Fuck men,” Tati said, loud enough to get some looks. “We’re prettier than them, we’re smarter than them. We’re just better.”
“Gooder,” I said.
“Women are fucking perfect,” she said.
“Perfect bitches!” a guy yelled.
“Who the fuck needs you?” Tati spat a wad of phlegm in the general direction of the voice and tapped me to do the same.
I searched my mouth. It was too cottony.
“I really mean it,” she said in a whisper. “You’re better than that.”
I nodded. I wanted to lie down.
“I’m talking about you, stupid,” she said, and smacked me across the face.
I grabbed my cheek and stretched my jaws. “Did you just slap me?”
“You know what you are?” she asked.
“Someone you just slapped?”
“You’re a ball,” she said.
“I’m a ball.”
“You’re the ball attached to the paddle, you know, the one with the rubber string.”
“String,” I said.
“The paddle beats up the ball but the ball keeps coming back.”
“Sounds like fun,” I told her. I didn’t want to get into it.
She squeezed her face. “God. You
’re really dumb for an Oriental,” she said, and went on about how her boyfriend was a real man who didn’t need drugs. “Vinh looks out for me. He’s got my back. Always.”
I want to see your insides, Benny had said. We were high on dust and he wanted to cut me open. We’d decided to quit shooting up, so we test-drove every drug we could find and found dust. When he said he wanted to cut me, this seemed reasonable. That’s what happens when you smoke. You put that stem to your lips and the world shrinks to a postcard. You see everything, all at once. You understand the connections. The moon’s a slice of salami. Your mother’s a ship. Lightbulbs and baby heads, honeydew and ladybugs. Knives and scabs and love. Everything made sense. Benny made sense.
“I want to cut you open,” he said.
“I said yes already.”
“Yeah, but I really want to.”
“You want me to get the blade?” I asked.
“No. I think that should be my job. I don’t want to be lazy about this.” He rushed to the table by the window and rifled through our pile of pennies, cotton swabs, cans of chili, forks and knives and packets of oyster crackers. He came back to bed with a razor blade.
“Okay. Get on your back,” he said, sitting up on his knees.
“You want to cut my stomach?”
“No. I’m sorry. Get on your stomach. I’ll practice on your back first, and when I get better, then we can open up your front.”
When I turned over I thought I might throw up. We had drunk almost a half a gallon of milk each to protect our stomach lining from the dust. I hated the taste of milk, so Benny mixed it with beer, and now I wanted to puke all over. But then he cut me, quickly, without warning, just below the right shoulder blade.
“Did you feel that?” he asked, his voice steady.
I told him I didn’t, but really, I wasn’t sure.
“How about this?” He made a second slice, slowly this time, along the left shoulder blade. I thought I could feel something hiss out of me.
“Am I bleeding?”
“Yeah.” He stopped a trickle from sliding down my side. “You taste like raisins.”
“Can you see anything?” I asked.
He got close, his breath warming the cuts. “I think you have wings.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” I said.
“Fuck . . .” he said, like a sigh. “Jesusfuckingchrist I love you so much.” He laughed and kissed the back of my head. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I need to focus.” He splayed the cuts with his fingers and examined them, making little sounds of discovery. I asked him what he saw now.
“I think I see a bone.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I think I see a bone,” he said again, as if saying it for the first time. He got up, almost tripped while stumbling to our table, and came back with a spoon. He jimmied the handle of the spoon into a cut until he found something he could tap.
“You hear that?” he asked.
I told him I did.
“What does it feel like?”
“Like you’re tapping a bone in my body.”
“I’m so glad this doesn’t hurt. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“Maybe this is your superhero power,” he said. “Maybe you can’t feel pain.”
The mattress felt damp under my breasts. I wanted to turn over but I didn’t think I should. I felt dizzy. “I don’t feel good,” I said.
“That’s impossible. We just agreed that you didn’t feel pain.”
“I think I need a doctor.”
“I am a doctor,” he said, almost sounding hurt.
“I need a real one, someone with a stethoscope.”
“Hold on. Wait here. I think I saw one in the trash can outside.” Benny got up, got dressed, and said he’d be right back.
Weeks later, after stitches and bandages and scabs, Benny told this story to some people but ended it by saying it was his idea to get me to the hospital, not for my sake, but so he could steal a stethoscope. He never got the laugh he wanted.
O’Brien’s turned empty. Behind the counter, Henry sat slumped on his stool with his arms crossed, asleep with the cigar in his mouth. His throat gurgled with every breath and raindrops ticked against the front door and Tati talked a string of ribbons, the words flowing so easily from her mouth, until at some point the alcohol in her decided that we needed to go to the Empire State Building. “C’mon!” she shouted. “We deserve to be on the top of the world!”
“I deserve a bed,” I said. “I really feel like I should have one by now.”
“I think it’s got like five thousand floors,” she said. “I read that somewhere.”
“I want Benny. I want to smell him.”
“I wanna stare down five thousand floors,” she said.
We were nowhere near the Empire State Building but I put on my sweater and jacket and agreed to go because it was good to have a place to go. I knew that we’d never get there. I knew this, in the same way I knew that Tati would never be a teacher, and that Benny would be the end of me. Life’s about confirming what we already know. About making sure. Didn’t I know I’d go back to him that night and find him on the floor, shooting the girl up between her toes, between the one that went to the market and the one that stayed home, and didn’t I know I would give up and give in? I knew. Henry knew. The man in the White Castle knew. Even the discount shoes and the plastic cakes and the blinking neon psychic knew.
Tati and I ran in the rain to catch up to the 12. With her skipping over every single crack, especially in those cowboy boots of hers, we didn’t have a chance. “Stop!” she shouted, but the bus was too far gone. “Goddamn it! I never have luck with buses!” she yelled, kicking a metal trash can by the bus stop. I thought that would be the end of it but she kicked the can again and again and bashed it down with her heels while screaming, “You fucking piece of shit!”
I wanted to tell her that people all over the world missed buses and she wasn’t that special, but thought better of it. When I finally got her to leave the trash can alone she sat on the bus bench and knocked on it six times. I stayed standing. The rain came down hard, the drops sounding like marbles against the shelter’s plastic. Across the street, people ducked under awnings or hopped into steamed-up cabs, and others ran past as if being chased by ghosts, newspapers and knapsacks roofing their heads. “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “I should get going anyway.”
“Fine. Go. You got your free drinks.” With her palms, she rubbed her eyes, trying to push the tears back in.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what she meant.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m fine.”
I couldn’t face her. Down the block, a man stepped into a phone booth and shut the door, spraying a clean blue light onto the sidewalk, onto the rainwater gushing down Hemming Street, which now seemed as endless as the guilt I was feeling. I sat next to Tati. The rain had turned her hair into strands of black licorice.
“I just really wanted us at the Empire State Building, that’s all.”
I suggested we go tomorrow.
“It’s no good tomorrow.” She kicked a bottle cap into the street, where a car with duct-taped windows drove by. “I wanted to be up there tonight, above everything and everybody. Tonight.”
I touched her shoulder and told her she wasn’t making any sense.
She knocked my hand away. “This was something I wanted. Me. Things never work out for me.” She took out her rabbit’s foot. “I rub this thing a hundred fucking times and it doesn’t do shit.” She said this and tossed the foot, keys and all, into the middle of the street.
I wanted to understand her but it seemed easier to think of her as spoiled and melodramatic. And I would’ve kept that opinion of her if she hadn’t told me that she’d been wanting to see the Empire State Building since she was eight, that she’d asked her father to take her but he had refused, saying she didn’t deserve anything good. He’d said i
t just like that. Then Tati told me she was supposed to have been born a boy, and the boy was supposed to bring luck to her family. Her father had even changed her name from a girl’s to a boy’s, from Tai-shuan to Taishing, and he shaved her head and dressed her like a boy until she was seven. None of it worked.
“Every time something bad happened to the family, my father beat the shit out of me. That fucker used everything. Rocks. Belts. Shoes. Whatever he could get. And he blamed me for everything. If he lost his wallet, I got a beating. If he lost his job, I got a beating. When they had my sister, he beat the fuck out of me because she wasn’t a boy. My parents had three more girls, so you do the math.”
It killed me to hear her talk about her pain so easily, with something as simple as anger. It had never occurred to me that I could be angry with my parents, that I could yell at them or fight with them or even have thoughts of throwing knives at them.
“I just wanted things to be different today,” she said. “I wanted to see that stupid building. And I wanted to see Vinh and tell him that I would’ve killed my father for him. Vinh’s the one good thing that’s ever happened to me, the only person that’s ever loved me, and that fucker can’t stand it because I finally got something good and his life’s still shit.”
Tati stopped talking and I didn’t know how to make her feel better. So I reminded her to knock on wood.
“Thanks.” She knuckled the bus bench twenty-three times. It took a while.
The rain kept falling and I felt as though bits of me were falling with it. I was tired and the booze was wearing off, just enough to remind me that Benny was in a motel room that I’d paid for, losing himself to a girl who didn’t deserve to see him lost.
“Hey, if you ever want me to go to those NA meetings with you, I’ll go,” she said.
I told her thanks.
“And if you need a place to crash, just say so, okay? You don’t need that scumbag.”