Lurkers

by Sandi Tan

  He had embraced neither girl, worried about smothering them with the pressure to reciprocate. Instead, they shook hands, like comrades. He knew he wouldn’t have trouble with Mira but he remained afraid of Rosemary—she was a mysterious black box of womanly secrets. One overcast evening, he watched her as she poked around her former backyard, digging into the raggedy blue couch and unearthing a stack of papers under one of the soggy seat cushions; he knew what they were at a glance—her dead father’s stories. She ran back to his house clutching them just as the first drops of rain fell.

  In front of him, she acted chaste and never discussed any boy, and especially not the tormented Arik Kistorian, who apparently still roamed free—in Florida. Yet he happened upon her more than once on the phone to somebody, her hand inside her pants. He’d heard her sneak people into her room and felt the tremors on the floorboards as her bed shook. He really didn’t want to turn into his old man and leap to judgments, but her silence made him wonder if the fire at the house had been her idea, winding up a gullible, hormonal boy like a high school Lady Macbeth. Hah, now there’s a character for a book.

  Raymond had the nagging feeling that he was failing her, even as she persisted in expressing only the politest gratitude. All that girl ever seemed to say was “cool,” “thank you,” and “I love it.” She behaved as if she was biding her time in his house, cleanly, quietly, as if it was some purgatory from which she would flee into her real life, far away. He recognized this behavior from his own youth, but it didn’t pain him any less.

  One Sunday evening, he surprised them by returning home not with his usual clanging liquor shopping but a bag from Best Buy. He’d bought them a PlayStation 2 to replace theirs, which had perished in the fire. Mira whooped, Rosemary nodded.

  Raymond felt he had failed the older girl yet again.

  Rosemary in fact did sense her own alienation. Acutely so. She was culpable for Arik’s act of arson, and her mother’s death, too, by default. Indirectly, but still. Yet here she was, being rewarded. She felt imprisoned by Raymond’s generosity. She didn’t want the fancy restaurant dinners. She didn’t need the cashmere sweaters. She’d gone from one cage to the nicer one next door. Only sex provided her with spiritual relief; only in bed, arching her back and coming hard while a horny senior fucked her, did she truly taste the freedom she craved. Raymond was the opposite of sex. Sure he was lovely in a sad, Miss Havisham kind of way, but how he oppressed her with his expectant, puppy-dog looks. He sought her approval in everything. And why did he have to drink so much? Was it really so difficult being rich and famous? She hated it when his words slurred and his reflexes slowed—and especially the way he spilled food down the front of his shirt after a few glasses of wine. This really, really frightened her; she couldn’t understand how Mira could just sit there and cackle. At least their parents had behaved like parents—their kind of tyranny she could navigate. Raymond, on the other hand, was home all the time, and all the time scrutinizing her, trying to get a bead on her, trying to impress her. She finally grasped the seemingly unreasonable desire of that girl Brittany Ann Yamasato to Shawshank away from her perfect, affluent, well-educated parents and their perfect, affluent, well-educated love. It made sense, running off to the boyfriend’s dorm, where they could fuck until they were sore and forget where they were or what time it was. It’d be like getting her own island. Maybe being forced to live with unloving relatives in Koreatown wouldn’t be so bad—at least they’d leave her alone, plus she’d be in the city and not trapped in the boonies. She was supple, she could absorb disappointment from any direction as long as boys wanted to fuck her.

  The three of them sat down with the PlayStation and put on “Katamari Damacy.” The game was essentially a graphically advanced version of Pac-Man, just as vibrant and cheerily uncomplicated. The player controlled a tiny green elf who pushed around a supremely sticky ball—the katamari—that rolled up objects that would stick to it, starting with small things like ants and mahjong tiles, and as the katamari grew, larger and larger things (cats, bonsai plants, schoolgirls, sumo wrestlers, fishing boats, houses, giant squids). There was a sneaky pathos to the whole thing. As the katamari got bigger, the world around it got smaller and quieter. During the game’s final phases, everyday noises gave way to the gnashing of tidal waves, the bellow of foghorns, and the anonymous rumble of large construction equipment. Everything turned epic, including the isolation.

  Raymond didn’t have the patience to master the fiddly console but he could watch the girls play for hours, drawn into the katamari’s single-minded hustle and the controlled chaos of its pixilated Japan. It relaxed him to see the world looking so clean, so logical, so giddily conquerable. Never in a million years would he have imagined finding satori in a video game.

  Outside, it was anti-katamari. The Santa Anas were in full force again, howling as soon as the sun set. By morning, all kinds of detritus that had been stuck up in the deodars for months, even years, found themselves spilled on the street, sidewalks and lawns. Bird’s nests, pine cones, shuttlecocks, hair clips, candy wrappers, drinking straws, against a carpet of green and brown pine needles.

  Kate spotted the letter quite by chance. She was backing her car out of the driveway, wheels crunching on all the tree crap, when something flat and pink in the center of the street caught her eye. It was a hassle getting out of the car and bending down in her condition—nine months, just about—but her curiosity won out.

  It was an envelope, unlabeled but already carefully opened along its upper edge. Notebook paper was folded within. As soon as she freed the letter—handwritten in black ink, entirely in Korean script except for the sign-off, “Beverly”—she knew. It was Mrs. Park. One of the looters must have either dropped it or tossed it behind a bush when they discovered they couldn’t read it.

  What was it? A secret confession? A suicide note? She stopped herself from instantly running it over to the girls at Raymond’s house. What if it was something really disturbing? Until she learned what it said, it was best to protect them. She put it in her purse and brought it with her to the student she saw that afternoon, Cora Ahn, a woman of Korean origin who was fluent in English but wanted to improve her writing skills.

  “I have an assignment for you,” Kate told her. “Translate this.”

  The student took the letter in her hands and glanced at its four solid pages of Hangul. “Oh . . .” she murmured as she gave it a cursory read, lips moving silently. “Oh!”

  “Why? What does it say?”

  “I will write it out for you.” Cora Ahn seized the letter possessively, clearly already drawn into its internal drama. “No problem. I can do it. No problem at all.”

  Kate came in the door and immediately felt woozy with cramps. Her mother bounced up from the chair by the window and began:

  “So, Larry called this morning and we had a long heart-to-heart . . .”

  “Mom. Not now, please.” She stood in the hallway, wondering if she should sit down. “I’m feeling a little strange.”

  Mary-Sue pulled down her reading glasses and gave her daughter a good hard look—and jumped.

  “No wonder. You’re standing in a puddle of water!” She grabbed the phone.

  Six or eight hours later, Kate woke up in a strange bed, with a deep grogginess behind her eyes and a searing rawness between her legs. She recalled the trauma only in discrete flashes—the freezing stirrups, a cluster of shower-capped women urging her to “push!”, the odor of rubber gloves, the coppery scent of blood. She wriggled her toes and the pain sharpened. Her insides ached, deep in some pit. When her nose came to, she smelled antiseptic that made her think of embalming fluid, and this made her gag. She reached out and felt a plastic pan by her side, already the recipient of a drying heap of mush. She recognized the peas she’d had at lunch, and produced a fresh mound over the old.

  The walls around her were pink vinyl, along a nursery theme—smiling duckling
s bursting out of eggshells—but the good cheer seemed generic and insincere. In the far side of the room loomed a couple of bouquets and a heart-shaped foil balloon that was already drooping. Her mouth felt dry. Everything but the plastic pan was out of reach. She whimpered, suddenly overcome with the desire to have Mary-Sue by her side.

  “Mom!” she wailed, from the bottom of her lungs. She was somehow too relaxed—drugs?—to be embarrassed by this. Then an awareness kicked in and she sucked in her crying before it became a full-throttle bawl.

  A nurse with a springy blond ponytail opened the door. Her nametag said pearl.

  “Oh, Miss Ireland! You’re awake,” she said. “Did you want me to call your mother?”

  Kate nodded and looked away, mortified. The nurse came over to her bed and checked her vitals, all the while making small talk to distract her.

  “She was here almost the whole time, you know. Left just a half hour ago. Did a whole bunch of crossword puzzles.” The nurse put a plastic cup of pills on the wheeled table and rolled it toward Kate while gently raising her bed. “I’ve got some more Vicodin for ya. It’s about that time.” Wordlessly and seamlessly, she removed Kate’s plastic pan without so much as a shudder. “Hey, you were brave. You rose to the challenge. Just let me know if you’ll be needin’ anything else, alright?”

  “Thanks.” Kate tried not to cry in front of the kindly, capable girl probably fresh out of nursing school. Her good cheer was unnerving. There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask her about the pain, about whether the fetus survived, whether it’d been a girl or a boy, but all she managed to say was, “Just my mom, please.”

  Mary-Sue rushed into the room twenty-one minutes later. She was in some kind of floral caftan that looked like a grandiose housecoat—she had intuitively put on Grandma clothes. A positive sign.

  “The doc said she put up quite a fight,” Mary-Sue said. “Seen her yet?”

  Kate shook her head; her hands went clammy.

  “Tiny. I saw her through the glass in the nursery.”

  Kate said nothing—her mother was liable to say any old diplomatic thing just to get through tough times; at least, it seemed that the baby had survived—for now. Tiny could mean not long for this world.

  The knocks on the door tensed her up again. Sensing her anxiety, Mary-Sue grabbed her hands and rubbed them. “Goodness. You can’t hold a baby with these icicles. You’ll make a lousy first impression. She’ll remember.”

  The nurse stepped in and Kate finally saw It, the creature she’d tried to avoid thinking about, the thing she’d hoped against hope she could miraculously pee or poop away. It was nestling at the bosom of the young nurse, wrapped in a pink waffle-weave blanket. Too docile, thought Kate, to even drool.

  “She looks just like me, don’t you think?” Mary-Sue said, and laughed at her own joke.

  When the nurse put the baby in Kate’s arms, she was struck by how much it resembled a hairless, anemic orangutan. Mammalian, but just barely. Black liquid pupils stared back at her, yet they registered nothing. There was no primal recognition. Its eyes darted back to the nurse.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, will you at least smile at your daughter?” Mary-Sue barked now. “You’re scaring her. I tell you she’ll remember this.”

  “In about a day, she should begin to understand who you are,” the nurse told Kate, stroking the creature’s wrinkly pink arm.

  “Which would make her far smarter than me,” said Kate.

  “Or me,” Mary-Sue added, a little too honestly. The nurse smiled amiably. This wasn’t the kind of humor she was used to.

  The plastic bracelet on the baby’s wrist came with a barcode, tagging her like merchandise. Ireland. Room 315. Though unlike something from the store, an exchange or return was probably out of the question. Not even if she came with design flaws like the floppy neck she had, or the overbite. Kate imagined the girl at ten, still staring at her with those impassive eyes, waiting for her diaper change. She didn’t know what to say. Their first meeting hadn’t brought her the maternal elation that movies, TV shows and Pampers commercials had suggested it would. That sense of possessiveness just wasn’t there. Her arms quickly grew tired and she found a spot on her lower belly to rest the alien beast. Finally it was of some use—self-heating rag doll perched over her sad crotch, infant balm for her grove of maternal ache.

  “You’re going to snap her spine! Jesus, Katie.”

  Mary-Sue snatched the bundle from her. She rocked the baby in her arms, leaving lipstick traces on her little simian forehead.

  “Oh, I’m so greedy! I’m just so greedy to eat you up, my baby!”

  The rest of the evening, Kate barely got another chance to try again. Mary-Sue refused to surrender her. She looked only at the baby, smiled only at the baby, spoke only to the baby. “You’ve come to save the world, haven’t you?” “You’re going to do great things, aren’t you?” “You’ll love your nana, won’t you?”

  Three days passed in lost sleep and strange new baby sounds and smells. Kate’s student Cora Ahn dropped by the house with an inelegant flat of Asian pears to congratulate her, but it was really an excuse for her to bring over Mrs. Park’s letter and solicit praise for her translation.

  At dinner, Mary-Sue insisted on reading it and Kate was too exhausted to object.

  My Dearest Kee Hyun,

  I am writing to you on our tenth anniversary because I have neither the eloquence nor the confidence to share these thoughts with you, face to face. I have always felt that you were like some kind of a saint—a man so wise he would instantly recognize the terrible qualities in myself that I had not even known were there.

  At this very moment, while I am composing this letter at the kitchen table, you have locked yourself in the bedroom again to write Sunday’s sermon. It is the only time of the week when I feel I am not being watched upon or judged by you. Again, this is not a complaint but an expression of how safe and well taken care of I am in your company.

  Many times in the past, when asked why you picked me, you told people: “Because I took pity on her.” Although we all knew you were only joking, I felt that there was a truth to this. I am grateful to you for your patience and tolerance. Nobody would have guessed that the girl who was thought too bold in manner and too coarse in appearance to snare a mate would find a husband as devoted as you. Remember how my father mocked me when I brought you home to dinner? He could not understand how a respectable man like you could have feelings for me. Even on his deathbed, he never stopped telling me how awkward I looked and that I did not deserve to be married. I always thought it was a cruel irony that you should have taken over his ministry.

  I would have given up all hope of marriage if I hadn’t met you that fateful day at church. I still do not understand why you had gone there, as you were a nonbeliever. It was your first time in a church, you said. Were you lonely? Depressed? Suicidal? This remains a mystery.

  Over the years, I have seen your hair turn gray and then white, and the white hairs retreating up your scalp. I have watched your skin sag, your wrists grow thin and your chest slowly collapse into itself. Yet, in spite of all this, I want you to know that you mean the world to me, and that if you somehow vanished from my life, I would fade and wilt. Not even our two daughters would be able to fill the empty space of your absence. I would not want to go on.

  I know it was a difficult thing for you, allowing me to have the girls. I know it was never your intention to have any children. I am deeply grateful to you for granting me my wishes against your own, and I think we are raising two healthy daughters who will bring us warmth and security in the future. My only wish is that I understood them better. Perhaps you will change your mind and allow me to teach them Korean?

  I miss our homeland very much. This may not seem obvious because I do not keep in touch with my relatives. It is difficult for me to contact these aunts and cousins because e
very time I pick up the phone, it is like reopening an old wound. There is so much envy and resentment, on both sides. They are always waiting for news of misfortune so they can proclaim me a fool for living in America, a place they believe we will always be treated as second-class citizens. Remember how happy my aunts were to hear about the LA riots? They rejoiced at any news of Koreans being attacked by real Americans. I am often convinced that empathy does not exist in Asia. What we have there is a Confucian culture of sadism, competition and materialism. It is how dictators and despots keep people subservient. Consumerism does the rest. America makes me grateful and hopeful.

  Finally, I would like to express to you my growing sentimental attachment to our life. Although I began with deep ambivalence, I now love our old house on Santa Claus Lane. I feel happy and contented here. I can see us growing old together under this roof.

  Yours faithfully, always,

  Beverly

  Kate’s initial reaction was that her student had embellished the letter in translation, adding eloquent, sentimental touches. But that seemed unlikely—Cora was one of the most boringly honest people she’d known.

  “Well, we have to take this over to the girls, don’t you think?” said Mary-Sue, putting the baby down on the sofa.

  “I’m not so sure. It could really freak them out.”

  “Freak them out why? To learn that their mother was a human being with thoughts and feelings?”

  Kate held her tongue. “There’s no rush. I mean, the mother’s already dead.”

  “That’s a fine thing to say.”

  “What I meant was, I don’t see what good can come of this. It’s none of our business.” Kate pocketed the original letter so her mother couldn’t do anything hasty.

  “You’re exhausted. Go to bed. To be discussed. Shoo.”

  Kate conceded, and shambled up the stairs, taking one last look at the domestic tableau—Grandma and the Blob illuminated by some TV cop procedural. Nobody was going anywhere.