“It’s okay,” I say.
“It’s not okay,” he says. “I’d be upset if I were in your shoes.”
I keep quiet, nodding as he explains his lateness. “It was traffic inferno inside the tunnel,” he says. “Everyone’s probably heading to Mirage for spring break. Plus, there was no signal in the tunnel.”
I continue listening. What else can I do? It’s not like he caused the traffic. All that matters now is that he’s here. And I was not stood up.
As we approach a red light, he drums his fingers on my hand. “Ken Zaroo-nee?”
“Yeah?”
“Mind if we just drive for a while?” he says. “Maybe go to a park? It’s such a nice night it’d be a waste if we spend it inside a movie theater. Is that cool with you?”
Of course it is. It’s cool just being chauffeured by Dorian Gray’s look-alike. Never would I have imagined cruising around South Kristol in a car that, before tonight, only existed in sci-fi movies and TV shows. It looks very deceiving. From the outside, it’s just a plain and small, box-shaped wagon. But inside it’s roomy, with wide-bodied reclining seats upholstered in soft leather.
The car runs without a key; instead of an ignition there’s a red POWER button that Ran pushes to start or stop the engine. Behind the steering wheel are brightly lit, colorful panels. One is for the GPS that shows which road we’re on and notifies us of any traffic or accidents in the vicinity. My favorite part about Ran’s car is the sound system that makes me feel like I’m riding inside Ran’s playlist.
As Ran drives us to the next chapter of the night—I want to call it “Cruising with Dorian Gray’s Double”—a list of questions begins to multiply in my head:
What is Richie Rich doing with Winnie-the-Poor?
Why can’t South Kristol be a phoenix and rise from its third-world ashes?
What can I possibly have that Ran’s money can’t buy?
Does he want to trade places with me for a day? For forever? He can be the after-school bookworm library monitor who lives in a two-bedroom household in a run-down four-story apartment building, and I will dye my hair blond and be Dorian Gray’s look-alike from up north who drives a computerized car.
What if he turns out to be the Dorian Gray of North Kristol who never gets old because he likes to hang out in the underworld and smoke opium?
Does that mean he is a sucker for vices?
Does that make me an accomplice to his vice?
Am I a vice?
* * *
• • •
“Wow, check out the moon, Ken Z.” Ran stops his car in the park’s desolate parking lot. I step out to get a better look at the sky. I’ve never seen the moon so bright and bold as tonight. Like it has nothing to hide and everything to share.
Ran and I spend most of tonight talking. Actually, he does most of the talking.
Truth is I’m really not a talker.
I much prefer to listen, or write. That’s why I get along well with Estelle and CaZZ.
They love to talk; I love to listen. Estelle says it’s because I’m a writer, and writers get their inspirations from listening.
That’s me: Ken Z, PhD from All-Ears University.
Ran asks me about my family. As it turns out, our commonality extends beyond our mutual interest in Oscar Wilde. We are both only children. We live with our mothers; our fathers are the missing ribs in our genealogy. Mine deserted the family portrait before I was born, but Ran knows his father; he is a general in the North Kristol Army who abandoned Ran and his mother to build another family or two elsewhere. Ran thinks he’s got half siblings scattered all over the Pacific Islands.
“What about your mom?” Ran asks.
“My mom?”
Where do I start? She reads a lot and listens to jazz. She’s also not much of a talker. Like they say: like mother, like Ken Z. Even when we’re together, we’re in silent mode. And it’s not because we dislike or are indifferent to each other. We don’t constantly need words to communicate, because silence, too, is a form of communication. That’s what I learned from her. She always knows when something is up. And for the most part, I can read right through her silence.
She once told me the problem with a lot of people is they talk so much that they’ve lost the ability to listen. So much so that they end up repeating themselves over and over. “If people spent more time listening, there wouldn’t be so much misunderstanding in this world,” she said.
“Ken Z?” It’s Ran’s voice, trying to fish me out from my sea of monologues.
“Huh?”
“Your mom,” he says. “What does she do?”
“She’s a manager in a diner on the Pula reservation,” I say. “And yours works for the North Kristol Army, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She designs military exercises.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mock combat fighting.”
“Mock as in fake?”
“Except it can turn real.”
“The soldiers kill each other?”
He nods.
“I can’t really go into it.” He pauses. “Because I shouldn’t. And because my mom will go ballistic if she ever finds out.”
“She won’t,” I say.
“I thought so,” he says. “You’re someone I can trust, right, Ken Z?”
“Of course,” I say.
From what I’ve read online about North Kristol and what people who’ve visited there have told me, the place is immaculate. It’s got everything: beautiful beaches, majestic waterfalls, hot springs, paved highways, top-notch schools, opera, theater, a powerful armed force.
Supposedly, no one is poor or uneducated, so I ask Ran if that’s true.
“Pretty much,” he says, “because education is free.”
“Even college?” I ask.
“Even college.”
“Wow,” I say, trying not to sound envious. Too bad I can’t say the same thing about South Kristol. Though public school is free, the dropout rate is high. Most students end up quitting before graduation to work full time so they can help support their families.
“What about the poor?” I ask.
Ran shakes his head, explains there’s a job for everyone, able-bodied or not, young or old.
“What about the homeless?” I say.
He pauses to think. “None,” he says. “None that I’ve seen, anyway. We don’t see them.”
“What about crime?” I ask.
He answers, “Hardly.”
“Really?” I say incredulously.
“Really,” he says, and explains that punishment is severe, even for a misdemeanor, like shoplifting. “Or chewing gum in public.”
“So that’s true—about chewing gum in public?”
“Yes,” he says. “They fine you. It’s worse if you get caught smoking or drinking alcohol on the streets.”
I wait for an explanation.
“They send you to jail,” he says. “And if you break the law again, they take you straight to rehab, which is on the base.”
“On the base?” I ask.
“That’s where it is,” he says. “And the prison.”
“So they shoot you if you try to escape?” I say sarcastically.
“That’s part of it,” he says.
I look at him. No grin on his face to tell me he’s joking.
“Is that on the Internet?” I say. “I don’t remember reading that on the Web.”
“Don’t believe everything you read online, Ken Z,” he says.
“So what’s the other part?” I ask.
“Well, once you become a prisoner, you become theirs for life,” he says.
“Who are they?”
“The military,” he answers. Then he goes on to say that prisoners are trained for comba
t fighting, then sent off to war.
“So war is their sentence,” I say.
“More or less,” he says.
Then, all of a sudden, I remember reading on a news website a few months ago about a bunch of people from South Kristol who got arrested in North Kristol for living there illegally. They’d gone there on tourist visas and ended up staying and working, some for several years. I guess someone snitched on them. I forgot exactly how many of them there were, but they all lived together under one roof. I wonder if they ended up in prison and are now dead on some battlefield.
“Utopia is not so perfect after all,” I say, more to myself than to him.
“It never is,” he says.
The two of us sit there on the park bench, soaking up the moonlit silence.
“Ran, I have a confession to make,” I say, trying to steady my words.
“Confession?”
“It’s about Zafar,” I say.
He gives me a puzzled look.
“The Z in my name,” I remind him.
“Oh, that Zafar. Your middle name.”
“Well, it’s not really Zafar.”
“Oh,” he says.
“It stands for nothing. Just Z without a period.”
“As in Ken Zero?” he says, and flashes a smile with a wink. Or what Estelle calls a “swink.”
“That’s me,” I say. “And that’s the honest-to-goodness truth,” I add, hoping the bitter aftertaste of a lie will leave my tongue. It doesn’t.
“Don’t worry about it, Ken Z,” he says. “It’s nothing.”
“I kind of wished it stood for something, though.”
“Then make it up.”
“That’s what my mother said.”
“And you already did,” he says. “Zafar. Cool name.”
“Not if it means a deadly weapon,” I say. “I looked it up on Quickiepedia.”
He bursts out laughing. “Good one, Ken Z.”
“That’s what lying does,” I say.
“Well, Oscar Wilde changed his name,” he says. “After he got out of prison and went to live in exile, in Paris. He became Sebastian Melmoth.”
Wow, I think. Ran knows a lot about Oscar.
“Even his wife and two sons—they, too, had to change their names. Soon after they fled England, while Oscar was still on trial.”
“Poor Oscar,” I say.
“Poor Sebastian,” Ran says.
“So tragic.”
“Fame, fortune, fall. And all because of…” He pauses. “I don’t want to be your spoiler. Just read it. It’s all in De Profundis.”
“Wow,” he says then, pointing to the moon. “She’s getting closer and closer.”
“I’ve never seen her this close before,” I say. I gaze at her for as long as I can. It isn’t like staring at the sun. No matter how bright she is, she won’t—can’t—blind me.
I wonder how many people in the world are watching her this very moment. I wonder how many she is guiding to their destination. I wonder how many are going crazy because of her, or howling or laughing like they’re on the verge of discovering something great. I wonder how many boys and girls she’s enchanting with her luminosity. Like Ran and me, sitting side by side, wondering how many wonderments there are left for us.
“Isn’t she so beautiful, Ken Z?” he asks.
“She is,” I say.
He casually throws his arm around me. It takes me by surprise and, for a split second, I shrink back because no one’s done that to me before. But the shock quickly dissolves.
“Thanks, Ken Z,” he says.
“For what?”
“For being here.”
“Welcome,” I say, spellbound by the moon.
It’s almost midnight by the time he drops me off in front of my building. The moon is brighter and closer than ever. As if she’s urging me to snatch her brightness. Take it, Ken Z. Take this ball of light, she seems to be telling me. Take it because it’s already yours. If you want it.
The Zissue
Growing up, I used to wonder if the Z in my name stood for the initial of my father’s first or last name. Was it Zeus or Zorba? Was it Zelig, the human chameleon? Or Zulu, the fiery and powerful soldier? Or was it Zukeran, the sweet potato farmer from Okinawa?
My mother never brought up the taboo topic. She’s not the type to dredge up the unwanted past, which means I shouldn’t either.
Then, one evening, hungry with curiosity—I think I was nine or ten years old at the time—I asked her in a roundabout way over dinner, “Mom, what happened to the period after the Z? Where did it go?”
“Nowhere,” she replied.
“Nowhere?”
Knowing she was not going to give me the answer I was looking for, I went straight for the bull’s-eye. I asked her for his name. She answered with a silence that equaled a thousand and one stings. A reminder not to tread on a dead zone over a fried chicken dinner. As far as she was concerned, he, whoever he was, was better off zilch, and I should get used to such emptiness in my life.
I bit my lip to hold back the tears.
She must’ve noticed, because she said, “Oh, Ken Z, make it up.”
“Make what up?”
“The Z,” she said. “You can do it. Make a Z-name for every single day of your life.”
“A Z-list?”
“Exactly,” she said.
“I can do that?” I asked. “Give myself names?”
“Of course,” she said. “After all, it is your name. You have to answer to it.”
End of mystery.
NAME ME Z
Ken Zeus, Zuperstar
Zeke, Zoom, Zabadabadoo
The power of Z
Case Closed
What I didn’t tell Ran was that, like his mother, mine also worked for North Kristol’s military at one time. This was a long time ago, before I was even born. Soon as she graduated from high school, she left Japan and went to North Kristol as a tourist. And she loved it—the island, its people, but more so her independence and the unbridled freedom that she hadn’t known she was entitled to.
“Ken Z, there is nothing more terrifying than discovering you’re a stranger outside of your small world,” she said. “Terrifying but also exhilarating.”
She decided to stick around North Kristol for as long as she could, looking for ways to extend her vacation, perhaps turn it into something more permanent. “Japan was home, Ken Z,” she said. “It protected me, yet it wasn’t enough.”
She told me this mind-blowing part of her past on one of those few precious nights when she’d knock on my open door and talk to me freely, openly, no word limit. I’d never forgotten it, just as I try to remember every conversation I have with her. They’re so rare and unexpected that it makes remembering them more urgent, necessary.
Since then she’d never gone back to Japan.
“What about Grandpa and Grandma?” I asked. “Did you ever see them again?”
She shook her head.
“I gave up the past,” she said.
I asked her why, and she said that she had to. “No matter how much I wanted to turn back,” she said, “I just couldn’t.”
“Because you had me?” I asked.
She was about to say something, then stopped herself. Her silence should’ve sufficed as an answer. Yet it didn’t.
“Do they know about me?” I asked.
She remained quiet. I asked her again. I wanted to hear it come out of her own mouth. For her to spell it out, because to me, silence, no matter how powerful, is sometimes not enough.
Like a cop determined to nab the villain, I pursued the issue. And the more I nagged, the further she retreated.
End of conversation.
* * *
• •
•
Tonight, the memory of that conversation returns to me. It plays in my head over and over and will not stop. This part of her past that’s gotten me all worked up and won’t let me sleep unless I bring it out into the open.
Soon as I hear the front door closing, I call out to her.
“Still up, Ken Z?” she asks, peeking into my room.
I go straight to the point. “Ma, why did you move to South Kristol?”
The question takes her by surprise. She covers it up immediately with a matter-of-fact “I was pregnant with you.”
“Why didn’t you stay up north?”
She takes a moment to think through her answer. She’s about to say it when, suddenly, she stops herself.
“I don’t see why we had to move,” I say to fill her silence. “Isn’t life there much easier, better?”
She looks me straight in the eye. She’s annoyed, or I’ve upset her. She wasn’t expecting me to hurl an open can of memories at her at two in the morning.
“I left North Kristol, Ken Z, because I didn’t want to raise you there just so you can be stuffed into a body bag,” she finally says. “If we had stayed there, the draft would’ve taken you away from me.”
“I would’ve returned,” I say.
She shakes her head. “They lure you with money, with dreamlike packages. But the moment you’re no longer useful to them…” She pauses for a moment. “Trust me, Ken Z, I worked for them for five years.”
“But—”
“Go to sleep, Ken Z,” she says, closing my door.
“Ma?”
“What?” she says, trying not to sound exasperated.
“Can you honestly see me with a gun?” I ask her. “I mean, really, Ma?”
She takes one good look at me, then ends her inspection with a smile of relief.
Case closed.
@ Wired
Monday afternoon, 4 March
“Finally!” CaZZ blurts the moment she sees me enter the diner. She and Estelle are in our usual booth at the very back, near the restrooms. @ Wired is our favorite hangout. It’s one of those old-fashioned restaurants that were once the craze in the ’50s and ’60s. Formica countertops with stainless steel stools, booths with upholstered red-and-black vinyl seats, and, in one corner, a coin-operated jukebox that cranks out oldies but goodies.
The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart Page 3