This Is Where I Won't Be Alone

by Inez Tan

  Sarah said, “You know, my family’s been really lucky in that we’ve gotten to live in lots of different places—I know how lucky we’ve been. But there have definitely been times when I wished we didn’t have to move.”

  I said, “It must be hard to not have one place to call home.”

  She said, “Yeah, well, I don’t miss it much.”

  Then she changed the subject back to cars, which I was beginning to see was a dangerous yet familiar subject to her and in that way, safe.

  “My number one recurring dream is that I’m in some vehicle that’s moving really fast and we crash. But I don’t wake up, so I still don’t know that I’m dreaming. I fly up and out of the car, and then there’s just this long slow grey pause of floating, and I’m not scared anymore and I’m not sure if I should be.” She pressed her knuckles to the dashboard, where they turned pale. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “I don’t either,” I said, after a moment. “Um, but Freud—”

  “I don’t want to die in a car. Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult your driving or anything.”

  “It’s okay, I’m not insulted.”

  “It just seems like a stupid, terrible way to go. Trapped in a metal box. I guess that would mean you were on your way somewhere, which is better than not being on your way anywhere. But every time I get into a car, I think, please not here, not now. Not like this. I don’t know, is that crazy? Do you ever think that?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “There was this one time when I was in tenth grade, and I’d just figured out how to make the perfect lunch with what we got in the cafeteria. What you do is you take apart the sandwich, microwave the lettuce and put salad dressing on it, cut up the meat and mix it in, then toast the bread and eat it with chocolate milk. But you have to time everything just right so the bread’s hot but the milk is still really cold. One day, it took ages waiting in line for the microwave and toaster and everything, and I was starving. I was carrying my tray over to a table when I felt my hands get shaky and all of a sudden, my vision started going dark and I felt my legs flop out from under me and as I collapsed to the floor, I just remember thinking, I can’t die now, I’ve just made this really great lunch.”

  “That does sound pretty good,” she said. “The lunch, I mean, not the collapsing. Oh my God, were you okay?”

  “Turns out I’m diabetic. I just have to monitor my blood sugar now. It’s ironic or something, I guess, that I passed out just when I had what I needed.”

  “I can relate to that, having something you really want that keeps you going, even if it’s a small thing. Sometimes I’m crossing the street and I think, that car could hit me or that tree could fall—but no, I can’t die until I’ve at least watched the next episode of—you know, whatever I've been watching.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “I’m only twenty,” she said. “There are still so many things I want to do in my life, like finish The Brothers Karamazov and go to a concert at Madison Square Garden and attend my grandkids’ college graduation. I’m in this ancient history class and the other day we were looking at the archaeological remains of Vesuvius, all those people who were just buying pots or something when boiling lava swept in and killed them on the spot. You think, did they really want those pots? I’d want to die knowing I’m doing something I love.”

  Right at that moment, a Ford Explorer jerked into my lane and I had to slam on the brakes and swerve and blast my horn at him all at once, because I am from outside Boston and we are the angriest drivers in America! It was pure instinct, and kind of exhilarating, but then I remembered Sarah and felt like a jerk. “Sorry,” I said, slowing down.

  I was almost afraid to look over at her. She was pale and a little faint-looking, but when she gave me this wry smile, I knew that she was back. She said, “You know, I don’t want to die.”

  “Me neither,” I said, maybe a little too strongly, because I think she got worried that I was mad at her. Which is stupid, her being worried, I mean, because she had every right to be mad at me and maybe we both just sat there being worried instead. The awkward silence lengthened, with both of us just looking straight ahead, and my heart was pounding and I was afraid that I’d made it all stupid and awful, but then I parked the car and Sarah said, “Thanks for driving. And thanks for being careful,” although I recognised that could mean a lot of different things. I thought of texting her afterwards, but what was I going to say?

  Dear famous poet, I’ve been thinking about how plot works. I am so ill-equipped to take on a subject like that, but I think maybe it has something to do with asking what comes after what you already know. In my film class, we read about the Kuleshov effect. The exact same footage of a man’s face was shown after a bowl of soup, a coffin and a woman on a couch. When three separate test audiences looked at that same neutral face, they concluded that he was feeling hunger, sorrow and desire, respectively. In my music class, we talked about how anticipation, heightened expectation, might be the thing that distinguishes what we consider to be music from unrelated, meaningless noise. We live our lives like strobe light flashes, hoping that the next burst will make sense after the next. Is that reverence or fear? Is that a series of excuses, or is it all there is?

  Last year, I took a poetry writing class (I’ve got nothing on you, dear famous poet, so don’t fret) with a professor who made us do tons of drafts. This guy loved drafts. He used to say to us, don’t try to make sense of things too early, to impose a false sense of order, not yet. He said, and I quote, “To write a poem is to submit to how your materials choose to reveal themselves to you.” I know, I know: this is poetry that I’m talking about! But we are young and we have so little. We have so little to lose. I know how that can feel like a challenge in itself, a live current that made me drink ten cans of beer and roll in the snow naked and afterwards, standing in my kitchen with icicle hair and still not a stitch on, text Sarah and ask her if she wanted to meet me at your poetry reading tonight. It was still a month off then. I don’t think I have ever thought so far ahead in my life. What was I talking about? Being young. We are young and I know you were young once, like in the 60s or something. I learnt in my theory class that if I’d been studying you in the 60s I would have been trained to read your life into your work. The critical movement at the time thought that if we just found out enough biographical information about the writer and applied it to their work, even the most difficult and obtuse of poems would snap open like a string bean. You make this easy by using the real names of your real wife and children in your glorious verse.

  But we are way out of the 60s now, and that brings me to my next point, which is that you are quite old. The year of your birth is not listed on Wikipedia, and your author photo on the back of your books has stayed static for several reprints. My point is, I don’t know if you still love poetry. I’ve gone to readings by old writers and come out pretty disappointed. You can tell when someone’s heart isn’t in it. I don’t mean to blame old age in particular. Plenty of people my age are already weary and bitter and cynical, and that blows too.

  But dear famous poet, I think you loved and still love writing. That sense of a first love—I have always found that in your work. Please don’t let me down. Please give a good reading tonight because I have maybe a date with Sarah afterwards and maybe the rest of my life riding on it.

  I told you that I texted her to ask her to your reading. That is true. But she didn’t say yes at first. This was her reply: Hey, that sounds fun, but (but!) that week is looking really busy, can I look at my schedule and get back to you? Now, dear famous poet, I did not discount the literal meaning of her words. It is near the end of the semester, most of us are taking finals or turning in papers worth approximately 30 per cent of our grade, and Sarah volunteers three days a week with the special needs programme at the elementary school. Bearing all that in mind, I understood that what she was trying to tell me was not no, but: make this worth my while. So I texted her various lines from poems of yours
, everything from the sad one about your best friend discovering he was not really an orphan to the even sadder one about the sea cucumber and the leek. Forty-one texts later, she said yes, she’d be happy to meet me at your reading, and maybe we could grab pizza afterwards if we didn’t get out too late. (Dear famous poet, please take note.)

  I get what she was asking of me—and what I am asking of you. It’s not about playing hard to get. It’s about setting the bar high, because anything less isn’t really worth it. If you follow that line of reasoning, literature isn’t worth it unless we somehow really need it, like food or water or air. It isn’t worth it unless we need it so much we think of it all the time, memorise it, repeat the words to ourselves last thing at night and first thing in the morning. (Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.) Some people behave as though literature comes under the law of diminishing returns—critical when you’re a kid so you can learn to read and stuff, less important the longer you live. But you, dear famous poet, are hale and hearty proof to the contrary. At least I hope you are, and that when you kick things off in Wembley Hall, just minutes away now, you don’t mess this one up.

  Dear famous poet, okay, whatever happens, I want you to know that I have enough mental resilience to not be a train wreck if any of this goes badly. I never wanted to be one of those people who lives or dies entirely by poetry (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, John Berryman, et al). All the same, I would much rather we went with the ideal scenario that I outlined at the beginning—weeping and smiling and sighing, candlelit tenderness, etc. etc. Something tells me that would be easier on me and Sarah— on all of us—though I recognise this is a lot to pin on you. Maybe I am ready to live or die by poetry because I am pinning a lot on you. I mean that if Sarah decides to never go out with me and it is somehow your fault, just remember that I am a very angry driver.

  I’m kidding! Really! But please give a good reading. I mean, good. In my psychology class, we discussed how any emotionally charged situation creates strong feelings that can easily get transferred from one state to another. For example, dangerous situations can make people find one another more attractive. That’s why we think firemen and flight attendants are sexy, and that’s why people take their dates to scary movies and rollercoasters. But that seems to me, I don’t know, unfair? It seems like there would be a power imbalance, and I guess power imbalances are unjust, especially if you’re the one pressing on the scales. Which was why I was glad you were coming all the way to Wembley Hall, which is just a seven-minute walk from Higgins, Sarah’s dorm, and a 12-minute walk from Baker, which is where she usually eats on Fridays when they do the cream of mushroom soup. I was very glad I didn’t have to ask Sarah to get in a car with me again to go to something fun. And I realise that maybe there was a price paid on your part. Are you ever afraid of driving, flying, travelling? Are you ever afraid of where you’re going? Are you ever afraid that your destination won’t make sense of your journey?

  But you are apparently on your way to us, regardless of any of that, and so here’s one last request, dear famous poet, dear wonderful beloved generous vital famous poet. Tonight, give us the reading of your old young life. Pummel our hearts, make us laugh and cry and feel more than we ever thought we could feel. Sarah will be in the audience, and if I can confess it, through most of your reading I’ll really be thinking of her, because I am in love, in love, in love, in love, and I need to know what comes next.

  Home

  I NEVER WENT inside the McDonald’s at King Albert Park, except as a child. Happy Meal in hand, I’d see groups of secondary school and junior college students in their school uniforms silently studying, their books and files all spread out across the shiny coloured tables. They seemed full of purpose, which is almost the same as being full of contentment. They were impossibly older than I was then and impossibly younger than I am now. Unlike them, I never felt like the place belonged to me, but that doesn’t stop me from missing it now that it’s gone.

  I dreamed about kissing you just once. You were sitting in a booth in that very same McDonald’s, talking to me, though I couldn’t hear the words. I kissed you, and you were kissing me back, and just like that, the dream ended. We’d split up a week ago. A construction site had already stood on that corner for years. I don’t know why every landmark McDonald’s is disappearing. If anything, I eat there much more often now that I go by myself.

  Where does a sense of belonging come from? A place? Who you were there, and who you were with? All the people I love and leave leave holes in my body, empty sites. You were the one who told me that home is something we have to make for ourselves. I picture myself looking into old buildings that aren’t there anymore. I can see us inside. A place we never were, as easy to imagine as a place we’ll never be.

  On the Moon

  ON THE MOON, in a passenger shuttle docked by the civilian landing port, Yevgeny Kuznetsov presses the button that releases the door hatch with a pneumatic gasp.

  The passengers—most hailing from the United States of America, Russia, China, Germany and Singapore—begin to board. In the low gravity, their movements are of a child’s in slow motion: large, exaggerated strides, the concentrated stomp it takes to land your centre of mass.

  “Good morning, sir,” Yevgeny says to each dazed person who clambers aboard, “good morning, ma’am!” He counts among his passengers between thirty and forty sciency types and a handful of tourists. Alastair Neo, one of the few true commuters, comes on board last. He makes this trip twice a month and is the only one who looks perfectly at ease in his surroundings. Yevgeny nods at Alastair, and the two men exchange smiles.

  Among the newcomers is 27-year-old Jaya Brijnath, 100 per cent a sciency type, who pipes, “Good morning!” at Yevgeny, a huge grin all over her comically youthful face. The corners of Yevgeny’s eyes wrinkle upward. He himself came over moonside at the age of 15 as a mechanic, but found that he preferred people.

  Yevgeny peers down the side of his shuttle. At this hour, it’s Dietrich and Ali helping to load up the passengers’ luggage and water tanks, stowing items in compartments that snap shut, strapping the larger pieces down so they don’t bump around during the journey to the central moon base.

  “Hurry up, you slowpokes,” Yevgeny calls down to them.

  “Shut up, you old man,” Ali shouts back, but they all laugh. The culture of the moon is one of ritual and repetition. Against the daily risks of being out here moonside, constancy is their assurance, as unchanging as the endless, chalky landscape.

  One immense metal door of the landing port grinds open, revealing the grey expanse of the moon. Yevgeny starts up the shuttle. As they roll out, moon dust sprays in a shower up from the shuttle’s huge tyres. The passengers talk among themselves about the sun’s unflagging brightness du jour: what rotation the earth makes in 24 hours takes the moon 28.5 days.

  The colony consists of a central hub and branches that taper outwards like the arms of a starfish. It is a hermetically sealed complex, with a self-sustaining air recycler. Inside the colony’s main complex, earth gravity is maintained. Lights begin to come on in some quarters, marking the start of another day.

  Tamara Brock, or Tamara the dog-lady as she is affectionately known, is already up and waiting for the first shuttle to arrive. She wears a baggy sweatshirt and ripped cargoes, her grey hair pulled back in an airtight braid. She is holding a slack leash, at the end of which is a sleeping basset hound. He is an Eeyore of canines, but Tamara has a soft spot for him and indulges his melancholy.

  Alastair is first off the shuttle. He spots Tamara immediately.

  “Good trip, Mr Neo?” asks Tamara.

  “The same, the same,” says Alastair amiably. He drops to a crouch and starts aggressively rumpling the loose bristly fur of his mournful dog. “Plato! Did you miss me, Plato?” “Give Sleeping Beauty some exercise, okay?” says Tamara. “He won’t do a thing for me and his muscles are turning into bread dough. This breed isn’t built sturdy.”

  “Got it.�
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  “Until next time, Mr Neo.”

  “Thanks, Tamara. See you.”

  Meanwhile, the gaggle of junior scientists gets busy unloading the equipment, grumbling good-naturedly about the return of normal gravity. They are greeted by a tall man wearing a primly buttoned white lab coat and circular goldrimmed glasses.

  “Welcome, juniors. Dr Lang, of the Mars division. I’ll be your supervisor here,” he says with a smile, shaking their hands. Jaya struggles to keep from looking goofy. As if she didn’t know everything about him already!

  Neil Armstrong of the Apollo 11 became the first man to walk on the moon on 20 July 1969. People have heard this story: that he probably said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but really meant to say, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” A lot of controversy arose over the alleged error. Armstrong himself eventually gave a statement that he would like the “a” to be printed in parentheses, like so: [a].

  So, [a] lot of controversy over [a] small thing. It’s less known that on that same flight, Edwin Aldrin, the lunar module pilot, broadcast, “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”