by YZ Chin
I swallowed the last piece of meat. My plate was littered with sections of the parallel bones. They looked like a railroad track all broken up, going nowhere. Some ignoramus said that all good things must come to an end. Well, all bad things must also come to an end. So what was the point of the saying?
Back home, another of Marlin’s documentaries on the couch, in an apartment turned eerie by absence. A computer-generated person dies in horrific fashion on-screen. I learned that right before freezing to death, victims can paradoxically feel so hot they begin to strip naked. That made sense to me; it reminded me of a bug by Ben I’d once caught in testing. The bug was what’s called an integer overflow, which is when a number is too large for its assigned storage capacity and thus can manifest instead as a negative figure. For example, if the number 128 were forced into a signed field that could express only up to 127, the input would “overflow” and be displayed as −128.
It was mildly gratifying to learn that the human body could also overflow. I idly wondered if, any day now, my pain would grow so great that it converted into happiness.
At some point in the night my mother called again.
“Why do you look so tired?” she started right off.
“Work is stressful,” I said automatically. “My visa is expiring, I told you.”
“I don’t understand why you still want to stay in America if it makes you so unhappy,” she said in a grumbling tone. “Move back home! Here you have people who understand you.”
“I’m not ready to give up yet.”
“You’ve already given up. Why you working with computers? That is not your interest.”
“Okay, can we talk about something else?”
“It’s like this: your mole is bringing you bad luck. I told you before, you got the mole because of your past life when your house was on fire—”
I choked down childish comebacks. You bring me bad luck. You tell unlucky stories about girls and ghosts that worm inside my husband’s head. You’re the reason my life has fallen apart.
“I’ve heard it a thousand times, Ma!” I said instead.
“Clearly you haven’t heard it a single time, because you don’t do what I say. All you need to remove bad luck is a toothpick and some medicine, I can mail you some.”
“I’m not going to put some unknown substance on my face.”
“Just try it—”
“I don’t believe you, okay?” I disconnected the call. I’d never hung up on her before. I sat around, waiting uncertainly for her to call back. She didn’t.
WHAT IF I DEPICTED HER NOT AS THE STEREOTYPICAL NAGGING ASIAN mother, but as a crafty and sophisticated weaver of narratives who only wished to motivate me via elaborate tales of past lives? Is that better, or worse?
You told me that I am not responsible for “decoding” my parent. But does it not fall on me to view and portray her in a positive light, if only for selfish reasons? If only to, as you call it, heal?
I HAD TO GET MARLIN TO COME BACK SOON, BEFORE MY MOTHER CAUGHT on that he’d left me. It’d be one more arrow in her quiver; she’d hound me with yet another past life story about how I’d sinned two hundred and fifty years before to deserve his desertion.
I started ransacking our apartment, plowing through things Marlin had left behind. There was a clunky laptop, many years old, that wouldn’t blink on, no matter how many seconds I counted after holding down the power button. My body clenched when I found the stack of Valentine’s Day cards I’d written him over the years. Their garish covers were an eyesore, irony corroded by loss. I flipped one open and could barely stand to take in my own handwriting. The more sentimental words were especially bewildering, in the way that a joke’s lead-up to its punch line could be.
When I bounced the stack of red and pink cards on my lap to line up their edges, a brochure stood out, skinnier and taller than the rest. I picked it out. On the glossy front was a picture of neat flower beds arrayed before a mountain range that looked like an EKG chart. I couldn’t be sure, but the image looked photoshopped. I stood the brochure up by its panels and examined it. It’d been put out by the Dowsers Society of America, and as I read on, I realized I finally had a word for the bizarre practice Marlin had started adopting.
In June, I’d been coming home later and later because of a programming intensive. It was held after work hours, geared toward people with full-time jobs. One day I returned to Marlin hunched over our kitchen table, his eyes closed. With one hand he was spinning a necklace in slow circles, whirring a pendant round and round. The chain looked like one of mine, a silver affair that had been an anniversary present from him. The pendant was a lumpy block of purple mineral that I didn’t recognize.
Marlin’s hand was incredibly steady. The necklace rotated at an unvarying speed that was maybe equivalent to a ceiling fan’s lowest setting. When I walked closer, I saw that the necklace was spinning suspended over a piece of paper depicting what looked like a diagram.
Marlin opened his eyes when I was near enough to touch him, his hand keeping up the hypnotic circling of pendant over paper.
“You’re disrupting my session,” he said.
“What session? What are you doing?”
He sighed, letting my necklace drop onto the table. I leaned in to examine the paper. The diagram reminded me of a color wheel with dozens of spokes, except instead of hues, each spoke was a noun, a word like “Beauty” or “Faith” or “Confidence.” My eyes swirled across them. They were alphabetical, “Desire” following “Determination” trailing “Endurance.”
“What is this?” I snatched up the diagram. Maybe I was expecting a tussle, or maybe I was just very concerned for Marlin, but the strength of my snatch sent the necklace sailing, airborne.
When it fell with a dull thud I looked at it eagerly, somehow hoping that the purple crystal had splintered into pieces, thereby releasing whatever hold it had on Marlin. But he had leapt out of his seat after it, and I saw the pendulum whole in his cupped palms.
I looked again at the wheel I was holding. In addition to spokes, the wheel was also surrounded by an outer ring of dense text. I skimmed the tiny font and winced at the most nonsensical phrases I’d ever encountered: “Brain-Cell Restructuring,” “Soul Energy Programming,” “Direct Healing Processes and Colors,” and other riots of New Age stuff hybridized willy-nilly with scientific and engineering terms.
“What is this?” I asked again.
“I’m learning how to contact spirit guides and advisers.”
“I don’t understand.” I could feel my brows furrowing. “This doesn’t seem like you.”
“Maybe you don’t actually know me that well.”
I’d never been so wounded by a single sentence. I stood blankly while Marlin plucked the diagram out of my hands.
Now, I learned from the Dowsers Society of America brochure that the diagram was called a pendulum chart, and what Marlin had been doing with the necklace was pendulum dowsing. Dowsing! Like looking for gold on a beach!
“The pendulum is a form of receiver and transmitter connecting you to your guardian angels and spiritual teachers,” the brochure said. From what I could make of its claims, Marlin’s pendulum-twirling was indeed a branch of the “ancient art” of dowsing, except modern-day dowsers had evolved from finding such concrete riches as gold, water, and oil, to now seeking advice and insight from intangible spirits. “Dowsing is unquestionably rooted in science,” the brochure continued. “Charles Richet, a Nobel Laureate celebrated for his work on anaphylaxis (severe allergic reactions), famously said: ‘We must accept dowsing as fact.’”
I looked up the good doctor online. He was born in the nineteenth century and had been a supporter of eugenics. Then I read that dowsers also claimed no less than Albert Einstein as a devotee. “The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time,” he wrote. “Many of the top dowsers are doctors, engineers and scientists.”<
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Einstein used to be a hero of Marlin’s. In college, he had definitely been one of those people who put up a poster of the genius sticking his tongue out. Marlin used to laugh along with me when I made fun of my mother’s past life stories and called them “third-world superstition” (I’m not proud of that). But if dowsing had the scientific weight of such a celebrated physicist as Einstein behind it, then maybe it was enough to lure Marlin over in his grief. A dirty trick.
The brochure’s last page showed a picture of a cottage surrounded by trees. The caption identified it as the society’s headquarters in the Hudson Valley, and a paragraph farther down welcomed all those curious about dowsing to attend a workshop, held the first Sunday of every month. My heart flipped. Tomorrow was a first Sunday.
I checked the time and train schedules. I could fit in a few hours of sleep before heading upstate. I didn’t know whether Marlin would be there, but there was a chance. I wanted to see him away from Eamon, who, having experienced heartache with his ex-fiancée, was perhaps planting poisonous ideas about me in Marlin’s mind. At the very least Eamon might be fanning the flames, reveling in the fact that he wasn’t alone anymore in his misfortune. He could be wanting Marlin to suffer alongside him, couldn’t he? That last part I did understand. I hadn’t wanted to admit it, but I’d felt a bit of resentment watching Katie and Bradley walk away with their baby.
Even if Marlin didn’t show up at the workshop, I could still potentially learn something about his transformation from the society. They—whoever they were running the workshops—could have been responsible for manipulating Marlin into his new beliefs. I would reverse-engineer their process and undo their damage.
After
Day Five (Sunday)
The train ventured north, the Hudson River stretching out alongside and winking under bright sunshine. I peered out the window, charmed. I couldn’t remember: Had I seen the horizon lately?
The river’s sparkling dips and crests, the clouds trailing wisps of themselves, these must be regular, yawn-inducing sameness for Marlin by now. Before he became someone who used a necklace as a telephone to the spirit world, he would go on weekends to the Shawangunk Ridge with Eamon and others to climb. The Gunks, they called it. How many times had Marlin looked out the train window at this view? I never went with them because I was self-conscious about the way I’d look, strapped tight into a harness.
I spoke politely and formally to the uniformed conductor. When the train passed a castle in the middle of the river, I ate a smoked salmon sandwich, gnawing away at the rubbery, oily flesh. And when a young couple wearing matching outfits asked if I would trade seats so they could sit together, I said, “No,” surprising myself.
THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE DOWSERS SOCIETY LOOKED LIKE AN AIRBNB darling. It had triangular roofs and a porch. The exterior walls were a display of whitewashed horizontal slats, and the front door featured a pane of stained glass. There was even a chimney.
I was early for the workshop advertised on the brochure. I figured that would leave me enough time to investigate the organization, though I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. In movies, people were brainwashed by physical objects, like hair-salon helmets or clickers that produced dazzling white flashes. I didn’t think I would find anything similar to explain Marlin’s behavior.
Maybe part of me wasn’t out to uncover the society’s working mechanisms. A corner of me wanted to be changed into a believer also. That way I could join Marlin in whatever version of the world he had crossed into.
I walked around the cottage once, then twice, not finding the flower beds printed on the brochure’s front. Already I had proof of their willingness to deceive. I peeked through a window, noting the floral-print armchairs, the quilts, the curtains with tassel tiebacks. No sign of Marlin.
Standing before the front door, I tried to practice smiling, or at least to maintain an open, neutral face, but the pane of stained glass scrunched my face, distorting my intentions. I didn’t know whether I should knock. The Rock wouldn’t. I could hear him booming: “Walk in like you own the place.” My mother said that in a past life I’d died trapped inside a house.
I opened the door and walked into a dim hallway. I blinked to regain sight, and a woman appeared, the hem of her tunic fluttering against the tops of her thighs as she came toward me. She looked to be in her forties.
“Welcome,” she said. “Here for the workshop?”
“I was referred here. Do you think you might know him? His name is Marlin.”
“Marlin, Marlin . . .” She aimed a blank look at the wainscoting running along the entryway. “Is he a member?”
This threw me off. I had been so sure I would find some connection to Marlin here and be able to do something. I’d told myself I couldn’t know what that something was until I visited the society, but now an urge crystallized under the woman’s expectant look, a repressed fantasy in which I found those responsible for turning Marlin into a stranger and forcefully made them stop. This woman, for example. If she’d confessed to knowing Marlin, I would have grabbed her by her tunic and told her to leave him alone. Or so the fantasy went.
“I’m not sure,” I answered.
“Say that again?” She cupped one ear.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, not to worry. Follow me, it’s this way to the workshop.” She started walking, then half turned without slowing. “I’m Carol.”
The room she led me into had yellowing crown molding and mismatching floor lamps in every corner. Why was it so dark in here on a summer day?
“Let’s begin.”
Carol lowered herself into a great big overstuffed chair in the shadows of a looming potted plant. I did the same across from her. She wasn’t what I was expecting of a dowser. Her voice was not wispy, and she wasn’t bebaubled or birdlike. No shawl either. If anything, she seemed like an ER nurse who cared deeply, yet knew some of us had to be cut loose into the void of darkness.
I was ashamed. I’d come here hoping to find someone laughable, so I could prove that Marlin was wrong to be taken in by such silly beliefs. At the same time a part of me, I realized now, had come in sincere hope that a healer would be able to unpack Marlin and help me understand him. I felt my arms and neck boiling with an invisible rash.
“It’s just us?” I looked around. One of the floor lamps tilted at a drunken angle, ready to keel over.
“It’s summer,” she said, her feelings seemingly not at all bruised by the lack of attendance. “People go on vacations. So. What are you hoping to get out of dowsing? Finding lost objects, cleansing negative energy, resolving mental issues, emotional issues—these are some of the ways dowsing can help you in your life.”
I wanted to ask if a husband fell under the category of “lost objects.” Instead I said, as neutrally as possible, “resolving issues.”
She nodded. “We can get into the specifics later. Do you have your house keys with you?”
Was it supposed to happen so early on, the surrendering of personal property? I thought cultists took their time to work their talons into you. It dismayed me, the idea that Marlin had handed over keys to our apartment. I stood up, ready to walk out.
“Take one, the lightest of the bunch if you can. Put it through this.” She leaned forward to extend a beige rope cord at me.
I rummaged through my pockets and sat back down, another jet of shame shooting up my spine. Removed from its usual context, my front-door key looped through the cord did look slightly mysterious. I wondered if that’s what dowsing was: a way to externalize one’s own thoughts, make them just strange enough to seem like advice coming from wiser sources. In times of uncertainty, perhaps a neutral third party looked more attractive than the selfsame brain jumble one had tolerated all one’s life.
“When did you start being able to talk to spirits?” I asked.
Her eyes flickered. She was probably sizing me up, sending unseen feelers out to interrogate the shape of my sincerity.
“
I realized I had a gift when I was very young.” She looked intently into my face. “But we’re not here to talk about me.” From a side table drawer, she lifted out an amber pendulum hanging off a silver chain. The amber narrowed down into a point at its tip, fanglike.
“Tell me what issues you’re hoping to resolve.”
I watched the amber spin slowly as she suspended it over her lap. My key sawed into my palm.
“Is it normal for someone to suddenly . . . channel spirits, when they didn’t even believe in them before?” I coughed. My throat was dry; it was a chore to speak. But once the first question was out, the rest gushed forth in a nervous torrent. “Can this someone become angry and unreasonable because of the, maybe, shock? Why do you seem so calm? Are all dowsers supposed to be calm?”
She didn’t answer immediately. “These are stupid questions,” I said. Unfamiliar energies charged upward in me, like I’d turned into a mercury-filled thermometer and someone had just put me into their hot, clammy mouth.
“Oh, honey.” Carol leaned forward. Her shoulder brushed against the plant to her left, and it sashayed, whispering. “The gift does not come easy. Sometimes it’s difficult for people to see the truth in the visions they are shown. But don’t worry”—she put a hand forward, hovering a foot above my knee, not touching it—“I can help you.”
I hadn’t noticed it before, but she had a S’well bottle flush against one leg of her chair. A sticker on the S’well read: “Ithaca is Gorges.” That bottle disoriented me. It made her seem approachable, just like other American women I knew; she could be Katie SooHoo or her lawyer cousin, or my gynecologist, or the host of a podcast I listened to on commutes. What did that mean? If she could contain the occult and still be cheesy and buy into overpriced consumer trends, then why couldn’t Marlin?