by Mira T. Lee
He’s also an artist, a sculptor. He invites me to his dilapidated garage-studio, where he’s created hundreds of molds of human body parts using aluminum foil, glue, and Scotch tape. “Are the parts . . . yours?” I ask. “Mostly,” he says. Shiny, crinkly. Hands, feet, torsos, ears, elbows, toes, even teeth. On one wall hangs a series of faces (“all mine”), on another a series of penises (“not all mine”). It’s fascinating in an overly intimate kind of way, kinky and very medieval. “I got more,” he says. Art has saved him, because the only time he can stand still is when he’s working. Then he confides, he’s never shown his work to anyone except his dog, a rescue greyhound he calls Chum. Not even his daughter. “I don’t really see her,” he says. “Fucked up too many times.” He gets into it, how she was born premature, how he was stationed overseas, how his wife left him for his best friend from college, and as he talks he bounces one knee, then the other, and his pupils recede like he’s transported in time. When we say good-bye he shakes my hand, his hot and vigorous, and I feel honored, somehow, humbled.
The next time I run into El Pollo on Main Street, his eyes are all buggy and he’s yelling at a parking meter. Pumped on amphetamines, probably bipolar, too, symptoms exacerbated by his PTSD—that doesn’t make him any less interesting, but when I e-mail a couple of my old editors it turns out no one wants a story about another crazy vet. I write it up anyway.
A week later, I get called for Art Assistant!
• • •
The proprietor is a thin, purple-wearing lady, long gray hair in a ponytail, pale skin that looks easily bruised. Henlike, soft-spoken, she explains to me about her cats, how Austin has been puking up hair balls all morning, how Abby likes to nap under the easel.
She pores through my résumé, taps with her pencil on the linen-textured paper. English. Tap. Journalism. Tap. World Teach. Tap.
“And why did you spend so much time in . . . South America? When you are . . .” She waves her pencil in the air, that circular wave people resort to when they’re blocked.
“Chinese-American.”
“Chinese!” She taps again. “That’s very far away from . . . Costa Rica.” Tap. “Bolivia.” Tap. “Colombia. Ecuador. Brazil.” Tap, tap, tap.
I’m flustered, confused. For a second my brain feels like it’s full of holes. She waits expectantly. But what would it be, I wonder, to conduct one’s life as a Chinese life instead of just a life? I speak Chinese, I cook Chinese food, practice tai-chi on occasion and drink oolong tea, but to flaunt one’s authenticity seems terribly gauche. I’m human first, aren’t I? Aren’t we all?
“Is there something special about . . . these countries?”
“Oh. Yes.” The face, so open. Puzzled. “Yes. Well, in China the traditional music is played by the erhu, that one-string instrument that sounds like a dying cat. But in Latin American countries they play salsa and merengue and even the old people go to parties and dance.” I know it sounds silly, simplistic, but it’s the best I can do to convey it, the essence, these cultural differences captured in a nutshell.
Purple Lady frowns, Very Serious. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar,” she says. She continues tap-tapping. Then, “Do you like working with people?”
“Oh, yes! I love people.”
“Wonderful.” The wrinkles on her forehead smooth themselves out. “And can you tell me why you’d like to work here?”
I blank again. But I tell the truth. News is high stakes, high stress all the time, deadline driven, and I don’t know if I can take the all-nighters anymore. I mention I’ve been through a few rough patches lately, and outcomes for my “condition” improve with minimized stress. It’s what the doctors always say.
“Oh.” She nods.
She promises to get back to me in three or four days.
I get in my car. I hear her voice like an echo. Oh.
Purple Lady doesn’t call. I call a week later. She says sorry, she’s found a better fit.
I drive to pick up Manny from the Pig. I don’t say anything. He pulls my head to his shoulder, rests his cheek on my forehead. That’s when the little voice in my ear calls, Mama. Essy. My baby’s first words! I whip around, but her eyes are already closed.
I don’t tell Beige about Purple Lady. I don’t tell him anything about the job situation, though he asks politely and seems contrite, as if he’s gone back and read some professional manual and is now trying extra hard to contain his subconscious biases against people with my diagnosis. He’s just a person, I suppose, not some robotic insect after all. Instead, we talk history. He asks about my first episode. “Insight is so important,” he says.
First time it happened. “It,” the zing. Freshman year of college. I was visiting the art museum, staring at Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror; the painting felt curiously bright. Ten minutes I stood there, you couldn’t have pried off my eyes, and then came my reward: the colors bubbled like something alien, and the girl’s body parts came to life! First her breasts jiggled, like ornaments dangling on a Christmas tree, then her stomach growled, then half her cubist face laughed openly at me while the other half distorted into a leer. Oh, Picasso, what a trick! I thought, enthralled by my own dreamlike state.
Well, the girl was me, of course. With one face for myself, one for everyone else, the People of the World. But no. That was wrong. There were the in-betweens: my mother, my sister, my roommates, my friends. And my boyfriends, never quite satisfying, though why relationships did or didn’t work, I still couldn’t figure—maybe I needed more faces, one for each person I knew, or maybe infinite, for each new person I was still to meet! And then it hit me. Oh, Great Master, revealing to me the ways of human nature, the ideal of the soul mate, why true love was so hard to find. Zing! The faces. We each had too many faces!
I took out my sketch pad. Crayons to paper, I drew furiously. Circles, squares, triangles, color-coded for physical, intellectual, emotional needs, sense of humor, artistic appreciation, sexual adeptness, musical tastes, compatibility for travel and confinement in small spaces . . . If I could capture it on paper, create an artistic representation of human relationships, then it would finally all make sense. I rushed to my dorm room. I skipped lunch and dinner. I sketched the whole night, in the dark, afraid that light would interfere with the synaptic conductions in my brain.
By the next afternoon, the electricity had subsided. I squinted at pages and pages of my multicolored scribbles, trying to reconjure the excitement—but the connections, they were gone. Later, ravenous, I went out for pizza with a group of dormmates, perfectly content to be one of the pack.
It wasn’t obvious then that anything was wrong. But the serpents, maybe they were born that day. Every now and then I’d hear tiny cries or whispers, like when background music played at a coffee shop or when air rushed through the trees. Too porous to catch, they slipped in and out, but slowly I learned to divine their special messages—through the words on a billboard or a passing truck, in the patterns of traffic lights. The Juice Is Loose! Share the Road. Red, red, red, red, green. Maybe I started to court them. Seek them. I fantasized about my very own muse.
Summer after freshman year, I taught English abroad. Luck, or fate, put me in Quito, where I was thrown into communal life: giant shared house full of gringos and pool tables and no hot water, co-op-style dinners taken out on the front stoop at dusk, tacos or spaghetti or vegetarian stir fries, pineapple crushed ice late night. Ten weeks stretched forever, friendships on fast forward, forged on the morning walk to the bodega or a bumpy bus ride or a jungle hike, cemented by nightfall, sprouting into love affairs with students or taxi drivers or salseros or bullfighters. Oh, golden summer! Each day sharp and transformative, glowing and singular, each moment a glittery embrace. People think of home as a single fixed place, but when I went traveling, I found the community of extended family I’d never had. Later, I learned there’s a Spanish word for this: querencia. It refers to tha
t place in the ring where a bull feels strongest, safest, where it returns again and again to renew its strength. It’s the place we’re most comfortable, where we know who we are—where we feel our most authentic selves.
I headed back to Latin America after graduation, propelled by the breeze of twenties-hood. Each time I set foot in a new city or town or forgotten fishing village, I felt like I’d been recharged, remade. And the beautiful people smiled, or stared, or stopped to talk, welcomed me into their shops, their gardens, their huts, their shacks, introduced me to their children and sisters and tías and abuelas, fed me llapingachos and fritatas and ceviches and soups, and I swelled with bliss. Those days were forever, life pouring into me all thick and spicy and I was bottomless. It’s like this, I think, to be happy.
But as time passed, I sensed tiny impulses like electric shocks, allusions to the next adventure. Somewhere, there was more. True Calling, ready for embarkation, True Love, waiting to be found! One day I woke and I knew it was done. After three years away, I returned to the States. I was convinced I had important work to do: to document the world.
I plowed through my journalism program, three internships, got hired by a weekly in Connecticut after graduation. I pitched a story to an editor who had visited our investigative journalism class, and to my amazement, she said yes. That summer, I spent six weeks in Vietnam, researching a story on mail-order brides. The scene was tense, seedy, grim—yet what work could be more exhilarating? I befriended a family with six homely daughters, five sold off to Taiwanese businessmen. The eldest had just committed suicide; the youngest, enlisted, awaited her fate. I staked out university cafés, karaoke ôms, the nhà nghỉs where rooms rented by the hour. True Calling, found: I would become a spy! Penetrate borders, bridge cultural divides, infiltrate the sleazy shadow worlds of Asia—Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, even North Korea. One day I decided I no longer needed a silly American disguise. I stopped eating, bathing, wore the same clothes for weeks. Exteriors didn’t matter to the People of the World. I interviewed bouncers and garbagemen and prostitutes, the homeless who looked not too unlike myself after a while. My mission: to tell their stories, to become a Voice, their savior.
By the time it became obvious, I’d crossed the threshold, lost all capacity to distinguish what was real from what was not. The professional term for this, I learned much later, is “conversion,” and suddenly everyone I knew spoke in worried whispers, and this alarmed me—I had to reassure them that they’d all be just fine! I lost my job in Connecticut, but told myself it had been too restrictive anyway. After all, the People were in every neighborhood in New York—even in Providence, where I lived on Jie’s couch for a while. At times my burden felt so overwhelming, I physically froze. My brain emptied, and all my thoughts seemed to float into a comic strip bubble two feet above my head. Words felt sticky, gummy, like the old typewriter I used in the seventh grade. Soon I was convinced some Higher Authority had bugged my bedroom, tampered with my computer, my e-mail, forged handwritten notes with my name. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. And then the serpents came.
She is sitting in the middle of the street. Stupid girl, sitting in the street. Under the manhole cover she thinks there’s a man.
It was a stern policewoman who found me, hands clamped over my ears, singing at the top of my lungs. I was brought to the emergency room. It was Jie who came, who physically restrained me from leaving the waiting area until I was seen and involuntarily committed.
That first hospital stay, I was a compliant patient, a Sweet Asian Doll, and for this I was branded with a Severe Lifelong Mental Illness. Later, I would be told I had a twenty percent chance of maintaining a full-time job, a twenty-five percent chance of living independently, a forty percent chance of attempting suicide, a ten percent chance of succeeding.
I was twenty-six years old.
This is life. One day, then the next. Essy’s first birthday arrives. I get a package from Jie, picture books and dresses and four boxes of Swiss chocolates, along with a card that says, Lucia, please give Esperanza a birthday kiss from her Auntie. Hope everyone is well. Please be sure to take good care of your health!
My health? Well, I’m pretty sure that’s Jie’s code. It means: Lucia, take your pills.
I give the chocolates to Manny. He devours half a box. He’s grilling steaks out on the front porch, freezing his ass off in a T-shirt and gloves. I’ve baked a cake, put up yellow and white streamers, a birthday banner, hung a donkey piñata above the kitchen sink. Susi would’ve approved. We light a candle. One! One year. Already one year. Only one year. It feels like my baby’s been on this earth forever.
Christmas comes, sneaks down the chimney, New Year rings itself in while I sleep. Essy goes bipedal—she wobbles, she toddles, she’s off to explore, I’m chasing after her. That winter is so crazy, one storm trailing into the next, and Mindy Griffin’s interviewing traffic cops and plow drivers and power line technicians, and every meteorologist in the tristate area revels in the snowfall numbers like a rah-rah sport. Driving is slow. I shovel out the car, fight with neighbors over parking spots, which they claim with crates and cones and folding chairs, a toy wagon full of stuffed animals. Our neighbors, they can be fierce.
Manny takes on double shifts at the diner. He’s stressed about money. Whenever his Mami calls he’s broody for days and won’t say why. When he works late, he drives himself home. One night he spins off an icy patch near the reservoir and skids into a ditch. Luckily, it’s before dawn, no other cars on the road. Luckily, it doesn’t happen three hundred feet later, where he would’ve crashed through the guardrail into the water and ended up on the channel 9 news. Manny refuses to flag anyone for help, so he starts walking home, goes about half a mile when a police car pulls up alongside him. He’s terrified. The officer asks if he needs assistance, and might he know whose car has been left back there? Poor Manny. Luckily, the cop isn’t a dick. Luckily, Manny isn’t hurt, but the car is totaled, and the accident freaks him out and he can’t sleep for weeks. He stays up all night watching telenovelas, complains of stomach pains, and when he does sleep, he grinds his teeth so hard it’s worse than a dental hygienist with a metal scaler.
“Are you okay?” I say. He just looks at me with his dog brown eyes. But he doesn’t bring up what I think he’s going to bring up—the papers. So I don’t either. It’s awkward, complicated, and the truth is, I don’t want to get married again, not like this, anyway. But for Manny, well, it occurs to me that maybe there’s one thing he’s more scared of than getting deported—me. Maybe that’s why we’re both tiptoeing around.
“Fredy has been sick again. Mami’s worried,” he says. Fredy, his youngest brother, born slow, with the defective heart and coughs and constant chest infections, who is always running out of air. Poor Fredy. I go to the Chinese herbalist, who sells me six packages of herbs for weak pulse, diagnosed as qi deficiency. Mami will need a special clay pot to brew the tonic, so I find a pretty mustard yellow one with bamboo leaves painted on the side. I bundle it with three-for-five-dollar I HEART NY T-shirts and bubble wrap, along with detailed preparation instructions. Packages to Ecuador need to be sent via courier, but when I tell them it’s medicine, they refuse to take it. I bring the herbs home, wrap them in tissue paper in a pretty red box, take it back another day. I tell them it’s seasonings for soup.
“Thank you,” says Manny.
“De nada,” I say. I hope Fredy is okay, because no matter what kind of illness, being sick really sucks.
• • •
Deep February, I land an interview for my dream job, at last. Feature reporter for a regional daily!
The interviewer’s name is Dirk.
“NYU. English major,” he says, nodding. Tall and blond with a dimpled smile, curly bed-head hair just disheveled enough to redeem his unfortunate mint green shirt.
Turns out we graduated from NYU four years apart. He asks if I worked at the paper there. I
never worked at the paper, but we play the name game and figure out we both had the same academic adviser.
“Not a bad guy. Brilliant writer.”
“Decent lecturer. Kind of odd.”
“A little awkward.”
“In that turtle-like, professorial way,” he says.
He’s gracious. We bond over our shared lukewarm enthusiasm.
“What did you do in college?”
I tell the truth. “I pondered. A lot. Probably too much.”
“I minored in ponderance,” he says.
We discuss classes, dorms, graduate school, and then my internships, the paper, the job, the culture, the expectations.
“Your book is good,” he says. He flips through my clips, pauses at my piece on Vietnamese brides.
“What’d you think of Hanoi?” he asks.
“Rich. Rich for the senses. For the soul.” I gush, feeling stupid. But it turns out he’s been there, he gets it. Dirk has seen so much of Asia it’s intimidating.
He points to my piece on El Pollo Loco, never published, but I stuck it in anyway. “This one is good, too. Why haven’t you worked at a daily before?”
“Just busy, I guess.”
He glances at the bottom of my résumé, the part with the “additional information.” Fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese. Some Hebrew. Violin. Electric bass. He raises his eyebrows. “Electric bass?”
I smile and he smiles, shows his celebrity teeth; he worked his way through college playing drums in wedding bands and somehow I’m not surprised. “This all looks very good,” he says. “We’ll do the standard reference checks, but it all looks good. I should be able to get back to you in a couple of days.”
I shake his hand. It’s warm and dry and firm.
• • •
That weekend, I’m buoyant, giddy, like a schoolgirl waiting to be asked to prom. Nipa calls. It’s one of those warm, teaser days in early March and she’s meeting some friends down at Ryder’s Park. Sure, I’ll join.