by Byron Lane
“Okay,” I say. “Fuck him!”
“Quick!” she says, grabbing her Hermès purse and plopping it on the table. She pulls out her wallet, her keys—Mom’s locket crashing down on the table. She pulls out a bag of Weight Busters cereal, rips it open, grabs a handful of the lightly frosted whole-wheat O’s, and starts stuffing them into her mouth.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Eat some, hurry!” she orders, holding the cereal out for me. “We need the bag!”
I grab two handfuls and start chewing. It isn’t until she finishes the last of the cereal that I realize what she’s doing.
Kathi points to the flailing lobsters. “I’m not eating Laurel and Hardy, are you?”
“No,” I say with a mouthful of dry oats.
“Then, quick! Get them in here!”
I grab chopsticks and plop the squirming guys into the empty Weight Busters bag. One critter and then the second.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, as I lower them down.
Kathi puts the crackling cereal bag in her purse and closes it just moments before the servers arrive with the next course—something liquid, gray, and inelegant, with floating lumps, in two bowls, one for each of us.
“Wow,” Kathi says, acting. We can hear the prior critters moving around in the cereal bag.
Crackle. Crackle. Crackle.
“Wow, thanks,” Kathi says as the bowl is placed in front of her.
“Should we clear some plates?” one of the servers asks, looking around the table, eyebrows furrowed. “Where are the shells?”
“Oh,” Kathi says, mild panic in her eyes. “We were very hungry.”
As the suspicious servers leave, Kathi exhales, then turns to the latest serving. She leans over and sniffs her bowl. “Fuck,” she says. “I think it’s alcohol.” Kathi picks up a chopstick and pokes one of the lumps, and a living shrimp spins around, glares at her, and tries to jump from the bowl. “FUCK! These shrimps are drunk!” she gasps. “They want us to eat these goddamn lit baby shrimps!”
Kathi grabs her purse and we quickly try to pluck each innocent being from their drunk destiny into the Weight Busters bag. We’re fast and stealthy but breaking a sweat. She stuffs the cellophane bag back in her purse.
The servers arrive with the next round. As they approach, I keep one eye trained on Kathi’s purse, fearing at any moment an innocent little life will come crawling out and drag itself across the floor, to everyone’s horror.
“Mmmmm,” Kathi says.
I look down at a bowl of live octopi flipping us off with each of their tentacles.
The waitresses leave and Kathi dumps her new plate directly into her purse. “Gimme yours! Quick!”
“Eww. Your purse! Who’s gonna clean that?” I ask.
“The cereal bag is full,” she grunts. Looking down into her purse, she says to the critters, “Hey, no pushing!”
The waitresses keep coming, the purse keeps getting more and more full with the most exquisite delicacies in all of Japan, raw, squirming critters and beasts and something tarantula-like. I try to gently pluck each of them to safety with the chopsticks, but the servers are impossibly fast.
Kathi looks to the door. “Use your fucking fingers! There’s no time!”
I flick a couple of terrified crawfish off the plates, and Kathi whips the purse to her side as the next course arrives, a big smile on the face of the server.
“You sure are fast,” Kathi says to them.
“For you, special guest, special dinner,” the waitress says, putting down in front of us a plate with a little fish bending back and forth and gasping for air so desperately we can hear it.
“But do you have anything fresh?” Kathi asks, sarcasm as alive in her words as our latest course.
The servers look confused, dejected.
“Just kidding,” Kathi says. She points to me and says, “By the way, this is my assistant, not my lover, just in case this is a hidden-camera show.”
“Arigato gozaimasu,” one of the waitresses replies, bewildered but polite.
My face twists with the awkwardness of it all, my fingers starting to feel numb from the jelly or whatever was on the last delicacy now in Kathi’s care.
Another course resembles the lower half of a seahorse. Another, like seaweed, except it keeps trying to stand. Yet another, unrecognizably flayed, its exposed heart still pitter-pattering.
Kathy says suggestively to the servers, “Maybe the next thing out will be Baskin Robbins Cookies ’N Cream ice cream?”
A polite giggle, and the waitress says, “Only five more courses.”
“Only five more,” Kathi says, her purse desperately twitching under her arm.
“Don’t you want to snap a picture of this, Cockring?”
“I only brag about the good stuff,” I say.
* * *
I carry Kathi’s purse back to the room.
“I’m not touching it!” she says.
“I don’t want to touch it!” I yell back, but I know where I fit on the totem pole.
Once inside, I walk over to the sliding paper partition that separates our villa from the outside, the cool, fresh air hitting me, the sound of the river flowing below filling the room. I toss what has to be thousands of dollars of living, mutilated fish from the purse, out of our hotel room and into the river outside. I look back into her purse and, still clinging to life, clinging to the inside lining of that designer bag, is one of those critters my father’s voice was yelling at me to eat. He’s breathing heavy, his tentacles waving at me, praying I’m his savior. I also toss him over the rail and watch him splash into the river, not dead, perhaps life inside and ahead for him yet, free from me and my father’s barking orders.
I turn to find Kathi behind me.
She says, “I’m giving you the best shit to write about.”
She says, “This will all be funny one day.”
* * *
I’m in a kimono filling out postcards, my body freshly washed and slightly less stressed following the evening’s dinner of mutilations. Kathi pokes her head in my room; she’s also wearing a kimono, the two of us, trauma twins.
“I’m bored,” she says.
“Does your tooth still hurt?”
“My whole being hurts,” she says, looking at my postcard spread. “Who are those for?” she asks.
“Various people, friends in L.A.”
Kathi flips through the postcards, reading the messages to Drew, Jasmine, Bruce (ugh), and my signatures on each: “Love, Charlie,” “Love, Charlie,” “Love, Charlie.” But she pauses, holding a fourth card, upon which the signature is just “Charlie.” Kathi flips the card over to read the address. “Who’s this one for, in Perris, Louisiana? The one you don’t love.”
“It’s for my dad,” I say.
“Why didn’t you write ‘Love, Charlie’ on your dad’s postcard?”
I look up at her. “Dads are complicated.”
“Tell me about it,” she says. “So are mothers.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, knowing I’ve said it in a tone of somber care, the kind of accent that births a beat in the room, one so delicate even Kathi holds for a moment. I continue, with a deep inhale, “My mother dropped dead in front of me when I was twelve.”
“Your mom is fucking dead? How am I just hearing about this?!”
“I don’t love the subject. Don’t be sad—”
“Sad? It’s fucking riveting!” she says, plopping down beside me. “Leave out nothing!”
“She collapsed in church.”
“She died in a fucking church?!”
“For a long time,” I admit, “I thought God struck her down because she wanted to divorce my dad.”
Kathi shakes her head. “Religion can be such a bitch.”
“I remember this girl in the pew in front of Mom. This girl, she had this crooked ponytail. She was my age, but we didn’t know each other. When Mom went down behind her, all these ushers rushed over. This
girl, she turned and was watching, watching my mom die, but then an usher and her parents, they grabbed her and pulled her away, shielded her from the sight, protected her from seeing a dead body, my dead mother. They took this girl out of the church, far from the drama. But, protecting her, it only made my view better. Because I was on the altar. I was an altar boy. And that girl, that stranger, she got whisked away, but I’m standing there in my black-and-white robes and I’m frozen, I’m still watching, I’m still in service to the church, the Mass, the priest—though even he left the altar to help. No one rushed to me. No one pulled me away. No one shielded me. And with that girl and her parents gone, I could see my mom lying there. I could see under the empty pews, her arms flopped weirdly under her. I stayed up there, on the altar, so close to God, the closest one to God in the room, up there separated, the best view, like there was some holy boundary no one could cross to come comfort me. My poor mom, her arms, the pink sleeves of her blouse, the ruffles of the cuff, lying flat, lifeless on the church carpet.”
Kathi says, “Carpet?! In a church?!”
“Every day I wonder how my life would be different if Dad would have dropped dead instead.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t know about your mom,” Kathi says.
“I don’t want to bother you with my silly burdens.”
“You think the death of your mother is a silly burden?”
I’m taken aback by her forwardness, and her interest, and my own admission, and Kathi’s sharp catch. All these years, Mom’s absence has felt like a lack of something, more like a void, until Kathi Kannon’s magic brain shared some of its boundless energy and gifted life to a feeling I only in this moment can see is true: Mom’s death isn’t something that happened back then, my memories of her locked away in the old boxes; it’s something present and here and a weight on my shoulders and a buzz in my ears all the time. My mother’s death is not a hollow ghost but a solid and constant punch in my gut, even now. I feel the opposite of blushing—I feel pale and cold.
“What was her name?” Kathi asks, sitting beside me.
“Amy. Mom’s name was Amy.”
I look down at my feet, across at the window, anywhere but at Kathi, while I try to spell out some sentiment that I’m not even sure how to put into words. “She had that locket. The one I gave you. That I put on your key chain. I gave it to Mom when I was in second grade. It was from a school thing—I’m rambling.” I take a glimpse at Kathi. She’s watching me more than she’s listening to me, calmly, coolly, her eyes soft and open—I can’t help but debase it by imagining how it’s a skill to look at someone that way, how it’s an art, how her looking at me would look through the lens of a camera, and why her grip on an audience is so powerful. “Anyway, the locket is … I think the locket … I’m glad you have it.”
I glance up and lock eyes with Kathi, her rare gentle smile now appearing, a smile of kindness not amusement, a smile that with a twist could signal pity, but it doesn’t.
“This all sounds so silly,” I mutter.
“Your feelings aren’t silly, Cockring. Thank you for sharing.”
I inhale, my messy signal that there’s more for me to share. I wait for her to ask more, to ask more about my childhood and my life, but I close my mouth, I shut it down, I look away, I choose not to burden Kathi any further about her bearing the torch for my mom, a desire that sounds so cliché, so unreasonable and irrational when spoken aloud, when considered in the sober reality of a cold and quiet hotel room, no matter the country or coast.
“Parents, right?” Kathi says with a huff, breaking the awkward silence and bringing levity and life back into the room. “God, I should send my mother a postcard. Do you have extras?”
“No,” I say, “but you can take this one I already wrote on and scribble out the name and write ‘Miss Gracie’ instead.”
Kathi takes the postcard and grabs a pen and starts crossing out the writing on a card I was sending to Bruce. “You sure you don’t mind? Is your friend going to mind?”
“He’ll love it when I tell him why he didn’t get a postcard.” Watching Kathi make an utter mess of the postcard, I ask, “Is Miss Gracie going to worry what the fuck is going on out here when she gets that card with all this scribbling on it?”
“Oh, Cockring, no. This will help reassure her that everything is normal.”
I watch Kathi remake the postcard, swirls of black ink blotting out “Bruce” and “Charlie” and replacing those with her own name and message. The only sound in the room is the creek outside and her pen mangling the paper.
Kathi brushes her bangs from her eyes. She takes both hands and gently tucks her hair behind her ears. The action makes her look so young, like a schoolgirl, her face exposed in a way I rarely see, so much skin, no makeup, no artifice.
“Me and Miss Gracie,” Kathi says, “we’re our own universe—a quirky push and pull over money and fame and speed limits for the driveway. Sometimes I think she loves me so much, it’s too much. And I love her too much and it’s not enough.” Kathi drifts a moment, and I wonder what film is playing in her head. Is it actual footage of her actress mother in one of her movies? Or is it the same kind of jerky series of flickering images we all play in our heads, our own selects, our own director’s cut of our lives, our parents and how we want to see them, our shitty fathers, our dead mothers.
Kathi looks at the postcard, at the message she’s written—a message on a message on a message. An inkblot to be heard round the world, in her mother’s town, her mother’s home, her mother’s grasp.
“What did you write?” I ask her.
Kathi smiles.
“Is it too personal?”
Kathi shrugs and waves the card around to dry the ink, clear the air.
“It must be personal,” I say. “Something sweet for Miss Gracie. Sorry I asked.”
Kathi looks at the postcard. “It says, ‘Not relaxed send help.’”
“Poor Miss Gracie.”
“She deserves it!” Kathi yells playfully. “And I think she likes it. She needs a hobby.”
“You’re a hobby?”
“To my mother and many people the world over. Maybe even you, Cockring.”
I don’t deny it. I don’t do anything. Being. I just look at her, her kimono loose and free. I worry that I’ll see a breast, but it’s not worth interrupting our little moment to express concern.
“And my father,” Kathi continues, “he was never there but always there. He was famous, too, but not quite enough, never quite enough of anything, you know?”
“No,” I say, smiling. She looks up at me and smiles back.
“You don’t love your father?” Kathi asks.
“Do you love yours?”
“Very much. I keep his dentures in a ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug in the guest room refrigerator. You didn’t throw out Dad’s teeth, did you?”
I say, “Not yet. Should I?”
“Nah. I like him there. It’s nice to love someone when they’re just dentures, when the rest of them only exists in your mind. You can just curate the parts you like.”
She hands me back the postcard she altered, with chunks looking like they’ve been redacted by the government. She says, “Loving your parents when they’re flawed and flesh and blood, that’s harder to do.”
I say, “I get it.”
I’m thinking, I could never leave all this for Diane Keaton.
Kathi fishes a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and turns to walk out to our balcony. “Wanna come outside and party?”
Kathi steps out and I follow. She looks at the landscape before us, framed in tall bamboo shoots, little carefully planted flowers and tiny mindfully placed rocks lit by moonlight.
“Am I not justified in detesting my dad?” I ask. “What if he’s an asshole? And hates that I’m gay? And thinks I should unbank?”
She drags on her cigarette, blows the smoke into the thin night. “Sounds like that’s his business. Where’s the problem? My mom
is always telling me what to do and all that. I just say, ‘Maybe so.’ Because, maybe so! Maybe she’s right. I don’t know. It’s better than being at war with her. I follow the weather, Cockring. Know what I mean?”
“I assume I’ll always be cold. So I just wear layers,” I say.
“No. I mean, I follow the emotional weather. Sun is sun, dark is dark, warm is warm, always a fifty percent chance of rain. It’s like ‘go with the flow’ but the celebrity version. It’s how I like to live my life. It’s not always how I actually do live my life—I’ve had plenty of screaming matches and epic fights with my parents—but when my mind is calm, everything can be okay. No war.”
Kathi, like a reflex, like an exclamation point, tosses her cigarette over the balcony. It spins in the air, in slow motion. The oxygen causes the butt to glow bright orange, and you can hear the thud it makes in the sand garden. It’s a scene right out of a movie.
“JESUS!” I yell. “You’re gonna start a fire!”
Kathi cringes, rare self-awareness taking hold of her for a moment, and she throws her legs over the decorative wood fencing and marches out and grabs the butt, leaving her footprints in the raked white sand, turning and knocking driftwood and stacked rocks, breaking thick old bamboo. “Wanna scratch our names in the garden rocks?” she asks.
I’m thinking, She’s going to destroy what’s left of an ancient, historic site. But then instead I wonder: Can it be both? Can it be vandalism and art? Can we love and hate at the same time?
Kathi comes back toward the room, leaving a second set of her footprints in the sand, crawling back onto our balcony, hurling her leg over the barrier.
“Look out!” I yell, too late, of course.
Kathi breaks a little pottery vase holding a tiny shoot of bamboo growing in the shape of a heart, a thistle that’s perhaps been growing for hundreds of years.
Kathi shrugs it off. As she walks back into the room she says, “I’m bored.”
I look back out at the trampled scene outside of our room.