Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  At dinner all the friends come over, and we sit around newspaper on the floor and dip pita into hummus and baba ghanoush and couscous. The collection of hands meeting in the center, sharing, is like a heart beating, and sometimes I let myself believe we are one big family. We drink wine and vodka and tequila. Tequila sunrises are Bader’s favorite, so I learn to make them for him. The best part is watching the grenadine sink to the bottom.

  Without Giselle, I am the only girl. And these men have huge dark eyes and thick lashes and smooth skin and full lips and sleek black hair. I don’t have to sleep with any of them, but sometimes I do, mostly with Bader. I like the billowy sounds he makes and the gentle way he kisses. I like the way he holds me afterward. I like the way he shuffles around in his pajamas and slippers. He feels like love.

  Giselle feels like love, too. Being with her is like splashing around in a swimming pool. She is fun and sunny and also a bit jumpy. Her auburn hair always looks tousled, and she’s always ready to laugh. The strange thing about her is that she never takes off her shoes. She says it’s because her feet are too small, and she has to wear children’s shoes, and because of this, all I want is to see her feet.

  “C’mon, please,” I beg. “I bet your feet are so cute.”

  “Nobody sees these feet. In fact, I was born with shoes on.” When she smiles, her chin crinkles.

  “What about Bader? I’m sure he’s seen them.”

  “Ah, the thing about certainty,” she says, tapping the side of her cheek, “is that it’s the great illusion.”

  “But—”

  She leans close and whispers into my ear, “Socks.” Then she tickles my ribs, and we both fall to the floor laughing.

  But she never lets me see her feet.

  Sergio is also French. He’s a squat, round-bellied man who flings his stubby hands around when he speaks. His peachy brown hair puffs out around his head to match his thick handlebar mustache. I like how he speaks, how he often ends sentences with yes. “It’s a lovely day, yes?” “You are hungry, yes?” I meet him during an afternoon walk through the neighborhood. A school bus has just unloaded a group of kids who walk slightly slumped under the weight of their backpacks. They must be my age, fourteen. As they disperse and start walking home, I wonder what they’re thinking about, what they’re carrying home from school, what books, what notes, what daydreams, and as they make their slow parade down the street, I realize I will never be one of them.

  And then there’s Sergio, also walking. He offers me a hundred dollars, so I sleep with him. When we’re finished, he pulls his pants off the floor, removes his wallet, and gives me five twenties, which I stash in the front zipper of my purse for safekeeping. He strolls naked into the kitchen and offers me a drink while I put my clothes back on. There is a kindness about him—in the simple gesture of offering me a drink after sex—that I appreciate. I have orange juice.

  Bader and two of his friends, Abdullah and Siraj, are taking me to a D.C. nightclub called Numbers. We sing loudly with the radio as we speed down the highway with the windows down, and I think Yes, this is life, this is my life. When we get to the club, they go in first, then sneak me in a side door. It’s my first time in a nightclub. The music thumps through me and the barstool I’m sitting on. Bader orders me amaretto on the rocks—“You’ll like it,” he says, “it’s sweet”—and I drink it through a skinny straw, watching the people on the dance floor move together, one dynamic entity.

  The DJ is playing a funked-up version of Duran Duran’s “The Wild Boys,” and the drums are big, and I want to dance. Bader takes my hand, and we snake our way onto the dance floor. Strobe lights dart through space, staggering time—a hundred mini-snapshots of Bader’s face, each one slightly varied from the last: a slight tilt to the head, angle of the chin, spread in the arms. Beautiful Bader. There are so many people, and soon I am dancing with them, too, and then Abdullah joins us, and I am diving in with all my body to the flashing, beating night.

  When it’s over, I can’t find Bader or the others. The club is thinning out, and I keep making tracks around it, looking in every dark corner for a familiar face. I call into the men’s bathroom for Bader, but no one answers.

  A beefy bouncer lumbers over to me. “Time to go home, sweetie. C’mon back tomorrow, okay?”

  “I can’t find my friends.”

  “Well if you go on home, I bet they’ll turn up.”

  I step out of the club feeling lost. How could they have left me here alone? The streets are already desolate, the sky starless. There is nothing else to do but start walking.

  “Roxanne!” a voice rings out. I turn to see two dark figures down an alleyway, hunched below a burnt-out streetlight.

  “Bader?” I call.

  But he doesn’t answer. I walk toward the men, and as I get closer I see a third body, lying on the ground.

  “Bader?” I try again, more urgently. I start running. I see one of Bader’s shoes turned sideways in the street. And then I see Bader, lying on the sidewalk with Abdullah and Siraj kneeling over him. His blood is spreading over the cool concrete. His throat is cut.

  I drop to my knees. An ambulance howls ominously. I pray the way the sisters taught me: Please, God, let him live. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are all reaching for Bader; we are wearing Bader’s blood. The fear in his eyes is our fear.

  The hospital gives us five minutes with Bader. They are filling him back up with blood. Sutures line his neck; they remind me of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Even his eyelashes, sealed shut, look like stitches. His face has turned gray and nearly doubled in size, as if the tubes are inflating him somehow. I’m afraid to get close, so I stand at the foot of his bed and imagine my whisper as a soft wave touching him: I love you.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  In the waiting room of the cardiology department at Boston Medical Center, I wriggled in my seat like a child hyped up on Pop Rocks and Pepsi. After the session with Opther that brought me back to my body, I’d finally decided to take a look at my heart. “I’m worried the doctor is going to find something bad,” I told Larry. He was sitting beside me, flipping through one of the waiting room copies of Newsweek.

  “It won’t be something bad.” He put his hand over mine. “You’ll see. You’re healthy; your heart is healthy.”

  “It doesn’t feel healthy.”

  “I know. But trust me,” he said, giving my hand a squeeze. “I’m a doctor.”

  We both sort of laughed. But the tentacles of fear I had about my heart ran deep. They took hold when I was eleven and certain I was dying of a heart attack. I woke my father up that morning, my hand over my chest, barely able to utter, “Something’s wrong with my heart.” And instantly I knew from the way he glared at me, still half sleeping, that I’d made a mistake. I quickly exited his bedroom and quietly but mightily hoped he’d go back to sleep. But he didn’t; he got out of bed and chased me through the dining room and kitchen in a terrifying and seemingly ceaseless loop. As we ran, he threw random things at me. One of them was a brick left over from some remodeling work being done to the kitchen. When it struck the back of my leg, he told me I better never wake him up again, not if I knew what was good for me.

  That morning, as I ran from him like some hunted thing, I didn’t know what would kill me first—my heart or my father. And in those moments, nothing else existed in the world but that fear.

  That’s what panic was like: only the fear and the fear and the fear. And now, after all those years, I was finally going to learn the truth about my heart.

  When they called me into the exam room, the nurse immediately hooked me up to a cardiac monitor. Dr. Davidoff came in and shook Larry’s hand. “Good to see you, Ravin,” Larry said. I wondered if Larry was embarrassed to have his panic-stricken wife in a hospital gown in front of one of his colleagues. Dr. Davidoff was tall and handsome, and I tried to pass off a mien of elegance as I
shook his hand and ignored the multiple cardiac leads sprawling out of my gown.

  “So you’ve been worried about your heart?” he asked.

  I could feel my pulse instantly rise. “Yes,” I said. “I started having panic attacks several months ago, but I’m worried I have an underlying heart condition.” I had told enough people about panic that it had started to become easier to say, less fraught with shame. “Also, sometimes my heart skips a beat. And it beats very fast, even at rest.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at the monitor. “You’re at about one forty right now.” He said this calmly, without a hint of alarm, and for this I was grateful. “Are you anxious right now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid of what you’re going to tell me.”

  Dr. Davidoff took a little more of my medical history, then gave me a stress test, whereby I had to run on a treadmill for five minutes. I started running, and about two minutes into it, my heart jumped in my chest. “It just did it!” I huffed, my feet pounding the treadmill gracelessly. “It skipped a beat—did you see it?”

  “Everything looks good,” he said, “just keep going.”

  When I finished, I stepped off the treadmill and hunched over like a marathon runner, trying to catch my breath.

  “That little skip you felt,” Dr. Davidoff began, “was a PVC—premature ventricular contraction. Basically, it’s what we call an ectopic beat, or early beat. Everyone gets them, though, and in a structurally sound heart, they’re completely benign. I get them myself, in fact.”

  “You do?” I wanted to know more. I wanted to know every detail of his irregular beats.

  But he just nodded.

  “You said they’re benign in a structurally sound heart, but what if my heart’s not structurally sound?” That was the question of my life. I could feel my heart speeding with the asking of it.

  Dr. Davidoff smoothed his left hand over his right. “From what I’ve seen so far, your heart is completely normal. But we’ll get you set up for an echocardiogram now, and then we’ll have a complete picture.”

  As we waited in the echo room, I asked Larry, “Do you think they’ll find a mitral valve prolapse?”

  “I think they’ll find a beautiful heart.” Larry kissed me on the cheek, and my eyes filled. This was my love. My steadfast, imperfect, surprising love.

  The technician who would be performing my echocardiogram was a young, sprightly guy, with a soft sweep of hair across his forehead. “Goooood afternoon,” he said, gliding into the room. He was thin and limber in his movements.

  He coated my torso with gel, turned off the lights, then slowly pushed a transducer across my chest. The swishing sound of my heartbeat filled the room, wet and percussive, and my heart appeared on the screen—a blob moving in various shades of gray. Finally, here it was, this worried engine of my body, revealed.

  I was afraid to ask. “How does it look?”

  “It looks like”—the tech pressed the transducer into me firmly—“you have a heart.”

  I laughed nervously.

  “See this here?” he asked, pointing to more gray. “This is your left ventricle. And over here is your right.” Then he turned to Larry. “But you’ve probably seen this tons of times, Dr. Chin.”

  “No, actually,” Larry said. “I look at brains and spines mostly.”

  “Then between us, we’ve got the most important stuff covered,” the tech said, grinning.

  Despite the jovial atmosphere in the room, I kept thinking that at any moment, one turn of his hand would uncover my hidden malady, this abject thing I’d been carrying inside me. “And they look okay?” I asked. “The ventricles?”

  “They look like very good ventricles,” he said. I smiled, and a part of me began to relax. A man had looked straight through my skin and muscle and bone, and hadn’t run screaming from the room. Very good ventricles. It was kind of amazing.

  The entire exam took almost an hour, during which the tech approached my heart from every angle. When he was finished, I asked him, “What’s the verdict?” I braced myself.

  He turned the lights back on. “Your heart,” he said, “is perfect.”

  Sometimes a sun rises in a room. Sometimes what we believe for a long time is the wrong thing. Sometimes we get the gift of knowing that, of beginning to believe something new. “Thank you,” I said. A rush began to surge through me, warm and electric—the smooth expanse of relief.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” the tech said, sashaying out of the room.

  It was Valentine’s Day? I couldn’t believe it. How could I have forgotten? I sat up on the bed and reached for Larry just as he was reaching for me. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Nobody knows who tried to kill Bader, or why, but Abdullah tells me that he’s slowly getting better; he’s even started breathing on his own. When I ask him about Giselle, he says she’s out of town. She might be in France, but all I know for sure is that she and Bader are gone. Bader’s friends have decided it’s best that I don’t come to the hospital, where I might draw unwanted attention, so I stay by myself in the apartment and wait. There is no humming, no dancing, no slippers, no love. It’s eerie without them. Even the daylight seems dimmer. It’s as if the world has lost an octave.

  During the days, I revisit the cupboards for cans of soup and sit around watching game shows and soap operas. When I tire of that, I play music and smoke pot. In the evenings I smoke more pot. I stare at the dark windows and fixate on their black sheen. I keep expecting a head to pop up, and this terrifies me. But I can’t look away. When I finally fall asleep, I dream of windows with faces pressed against them.

  On a rainy day, one of Bader’s friends, Duwahi, shows up and breaks the monotony by asking if I want to make a drug run with him to D.C. He is the only one of the Arabs I don’t like, not because he’s not beautiful like the others—with his yellowing teeth and frizzy hair and disproportionate nose—but because he doesn’t smile, not even when everyone else is smiling. But I’m lonely and bored and almost out of pot.

  As we drive in the rain, I watch the slick road through the squeaking swipes of his windshield wipers, the runnels from tires spreading into mini rivers. We aren’t even a mile from the apartment when we stop at a red light and a strange feeling overtakes me: something tells me to get out of the car and run. That familiar kick surges through my legs as I peer through my rain-blurred window and instinctively start plotting my path away from the car. I don’t know why I’m doing this, only that it feels urgent. But at the same second I put my hand on the door handle, the light turns green, and Duwahi steps on the gas. So I shrug it off and sit back in my seat while the bleak world streaks by.

  Duwahi parks the car on Fourteenth Street, among a row of strip clubs. “I’m picking up a friend,” he says.

  “I’ll wait here then.”

  “No. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so you better come in.”

  Outside the club is a sign that reads, THIS IS IT. Inside there are three naked women on three separate stages. As we approach the bar, one of the dancers comes down the stage toward us, her head up, her large breasts bouncing to the music. I’ve seen nude women before, but the accessibility of their naked bodies here, only a few steps off the public street, is shocking at first. I sit down next to Duwahi, and order a Tequila sunrise. On the next stage over, a woman is squatting face-level in front of a couple, her knees open. They’re having a conversation, the three of them, and I wonder what they’re saying as the couple slips dollar bills inside her garter while peering nonchalantly between her legs. Something about it turns me on.

  By the time I notice the girl talking to Duwahi, they’re deep in conversation, leaning in close, speaking into each other’s ears. She’s tall and blond, with a bit of an overbite. When she notices me looking at her, she stares back at me hard. “So you must be Roxanne,”
she states coolly, eyeing me up and down. “Interesting name.”

  “This is Karen,” Duwahi says.

  “C’mon, let’s go back,” she says, motioning toward the back with her head.

  I assume two things but am right about only one: Karen is a stripper at the club. But we don’t go to the back of the club for the drugs Duwahi promised. Instead, we step into a small room with a mirrored wall and a single chair. An overweight man dressed in black is in the chair, waiting for us. There is no introduction.

  “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got,” he says, looking at me.

  I look at Duwahi, then back at the man. “Excuse me?”

  “What are you waiting for—a written invitation?” Karen barks. “Take your clothes off.”

  “Do I even know you?” I ask.

  “Listen, smart-ass, you’re going to have to make some money sometime—you can’t live off Bader for the rest of your life.”

  “What do you care about Bader?” I say.

  “This is bullshit,” says the man in the chair.

  “You’re a real prima donna,” she says.

  Somehow I feel my only choice is to do what I’m told, so I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I take off my shirt and pants, then drop my bra to the floor.

  The man in black folds his fat arms in front of his chest. “Everything,” he says, pointing to my underwear.

  I slide those off, too.

  “Turn around.”

  I turn around, while Duwahi and Karen stare blankly at me, then at the man in black.