Soon the time came when I let those two snow-white pills sit on the rim of the plastic plate (nothing breakable for me, nor did I merit sharp cutlery, every meal eaten either by hand or with a spoon). Exhausted and undernourished, I had begun to hallucinate: tongues and tails curling and whipping just on the periphery of my vision, undulating frills of light, small scuttling creatures with long, filamented legs that quivered menacingly as they dashed out of view. The white pills proliferated and disappeared around my plate, two becoming four becoming eight becoming two again. My heart galloped along. My palms were damp. Dr. Panzov’s grin hung in the air like the Cheshire cat’s. I was unable to turn my mind off, obsessively reliving the trauma, thinking of my violation to the exclusion of all else. I looked down to see a blinding white dot on the tip of my finger. If I swallowed it, then maybe I would get a few hours’ peace. The white dot was getting closer to my face, and my mouth had somehow opened up to receive it. But then, just as the brittle leather strap of my tongue was emerging from the fetid cavern of my mouth, I put the dot of pure light back on the plate. My skin crawled, thin sheets of muscle twitching just below the surface. My thoughts began to break up and fuzz around the edges, becoming a deafening cacophony of static. A long black bug with feathery legs crept just past my defiled nose and slipped into my pillowcase. My heart continued to rocket along, my whole body gently reverberating with its percussive thuds. My nose, the seat of my universe, throbbed with each heartbeat.
The next meal arrived—a tuna salad sandwich with the bread still warm from the oven. I took a bite, mayonnaise dripping onto the plate. And then another bite and another, in quick succession, powering through the pain. I sucked on a few grapes, which slipped easily down my throat. Then I nibbled another corner off the sandwich and stopped, fearing my stomach would rebel if I ate more and all my effort would be for naught. I hoped it would be enough for what was coming next. I crushed the dots of light under the bottom of the plastic cup and then licked up the powder with my tongue before hastily scouring my mouth clean with water. As I laid my thrumming head down to await sleep, the static faded into a distant hum, my heart slowed, and I knew I had done the right thing. “Sorry, Mindy,” I whispered. She understood; she forgave me. Euphoria lapped gently up and down the byways of my veins, and a sweet blankness built into a crescendo of numbness. I embraced the emptiness tightly, fervently. My last legible thought was I. Will. Never. Let. Go. before I succumbed full body into the sweet lacuna of nothingness.
The blank fog from which I emerged blended seamlessly with the walls, and it took me a few moments to realize that the sub had been sundered from the conscious. Almost as soon as I finished squatting over the chamber pot, the door opened and Ting whisked in with breakfast and a book. The sight of the book made me forget to try to exchange meaningful looks with Ting, who at any rate kept her gaze turned down. Honey had been waiting for me to take the pills and was rewarding me. My fingertips traced the title: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-Hwan.
Reverently, I opened the book and read the dust jacket flap copy, lingering over the title page, the copyright page, and the table of contents before finally allowing myself to start on the text proper. I read s-l-o-w-l-y, savoring each letter, chewing over every word before swallowing the entire sentence. Ting came in on the second day with a steak, accompanied by a sharp knife with which to eat it. For one second, when I grabbed the wooden handle, I considered driving the blade hard into my chest; I’d probably have time to stab myself at least twice before the person monitoring the video alerted a bodyguard to get into the room. I thrust the knife deep into the moist pink meat instead.
It took me three days and six pills to finish the book. I went back to this passage and read it over and over again: “My life was absorbed entirely in my efforts to get by and obey orders. I was, fortunately, able to accept my condition as fated. A clear-eyed view of the hell I had landed in certainly would have thrown me deeper into despair. There is nothing like thought to deepen one’s gloom.”
Kang Chol-Hwan couldn’t control his dreams, though, and in them he would relive the horror of what he had seen during the day in Yodok and once again taste the sweetness of his previous life in Pyongyang. There were no dreams that stuck with me once I came out from behind the black veil of the pills; it was all blankness. So, in a way, I was the negative to Chol-Hwan. With nothing to do but think and remember all day long, my brutalization was covered by amnesia, my dreams blanked out by pills.
I awoke to find Yolanda bent over me, doing something to my face, her duck lips zipped into as tight of a pucker as her poor, molded face would allow. I thrashed my arms to ward her off, but they were once again restrained by the leather straps, and something was encasing my head, keeping it still. Rolling my eyes up, I glimpsed the white curve of flesh under Ting’s chin, a blue vein swelling like an electrical wire as she held my head in the vise of her hands. Wielding a pair of tweezers and a cotton swab, Yolanda was prying the bandage off my nose. I couldn’t tell if it didn’t hurt because the pills were still in effect or if it just didn’t hurt. Without a word, Yolanda stared down at Dr. Panzov’s workmanship, Ting turning my head this way and that for her inspection.
“How does it look?” I croaked, but she declined to answer, marching out without a word, leaving Ting to help me up from bed. I caught Ting looking at my nose and tried to read from her expression what she saw there, but as usual she was unknowable, a sphinx behind whose implacable mask I suspected nothing resided. With the bandage off, my skin felt vulnerable, exposed, the soft defenseless viscera of a snail without its shell.
To my surprise, Ting herded me out the door and led me back to what I now thought of as my bedroom. She ran the bath while I stood in the doorway of the bathroom like a dumb beast, my head hanging, my shoulders slumped forward, eyes avoiding the mirror. When the bath was ready, Ting scurried by me for the door. The scanner would not read her eye at first, and she had to blot at it with the hem of her shirt before the door gave way.
The bathroom was clouded in steam, the mirror blanked with fog. I flipped on the vanity lights and wiped away the condensation with an open palm, my face emerging from the misted surface. Head on, the change wasn’t too noticeable, though my nose now took up less space, shorter and slimmer, especially at the base, which had once been a sturdy pedestal but was now just a slight flaring, a delicate blooming of the nose stem. When I tilted my head, though, the damage was evident. Where once my nose had been assertive and muscular, now it was demure and petite. Boring. The knob was gone, and it was a straight, gentle slope from the bridge to the slightly rounded tip, which was almost, but not quite, snubbed. The nostrils, once dark tunnels that scooped up the sides of my nose, were discreet, well-camouflaged apertures. Its perfection looked out of place and lonely in my face. Remarkably, it did not bear the slightest hint of the violence that had so recently been visited upon it. My eyes, on the other hand, were embedded in puffy flesh, the bruising rusting into an autumnal russet with amethyst highlights that stained nicotine yellow at the edges. Beads of condensation slipped down the smooth surface of the mirror, silvery tracks rolling down my steam-blurred cheeks.
Emerging from my bath, wrapped in a fuzzy bathrobe mono-grammed with my new initials, L.L., I discovered a beautiful gilt-tooled, leather-bound edition of Great Expectations—the very book I had chosen the night Honey showed me the hidden bookcase—propped on the pillow of my bed. In the drunkenness that had ensued that night, which seemed a lifetime away but was only a few weeks ago, I had lost track of the book, and now it had found its way back to me. My little treat for enduring Honey’s punishment. But just as I settled onto the bed to start reading, Yolanda entered to stand before me, hip popped out, magnificently muscled leg on full display in a short-skirted tweed suit, green eyes lingering appraisingly on my face. “The swelling will go down in one to two weeks. Same with the black eyes. Man, but Dr. Panzov smacked you good.”
“What swel
ling? You mean my nose is swollen? It’s going to get even tinier?”
“Yes. You have a nose modeled on that cute Chinese actress. Zhang Ching Chong or something like that. Madam picked it out for you herself.”
I wasn’t ready for Yolanda yet, my skin too thin, my defenses eroded. “Thanks for dropping by, Yolanda,” I said, opening the book across my lap. “Oh, and I don’t need any more pain pills, thank you. I haven’t had one in twenty-four hours and I feel OK.”
But Yolanda stayed where she was, one leg jiggling just a little to tell me to stop wasting her time. “Look in the armoire.”
Reluctantly, I put the book down and crossed the room to fling open the intricately carved doors of the mahogany armoire, revealing garments of shimmering silk, crisp linen, filmy gauze, prickly wool, stiff tulle, soft cotton, versatile rayon, clingy spandex, and shiny satin, immaculately arranged in color groups that went from darkest to lightest. Shoes lined the floor of the armoire in order of height, from ballet flats to spiked-heel boots. “Madam thinks you are ready to pick out your own outfits. It’s a big step for you.”
Ting entered, pushing a rolling cart rattling with scissors, a comb, a hair dryer, and a glass jar filled with a thick paste that flooded the room with a harsh chemical scent that made my eyes water. With a shove, Yolanda directed me toward the bathroom.
“Madam has finally settled on a hairstyle for you. First we cut, then we color.”
As scissors snipped off hanks of my hair, I kept my eyes tightly closed, refusing to be witness to the persecution. When she slathered on the dye, my scalp stung as if attacked by a swarm of bees, my eyes secreting defensive tears against the fumes, and when she paused to let the dye work its way in, I steadfastly stared into my lap, carefully avoiding even a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Finally, she told me to bend over the tub, and I was surprised at the gentle way she massaged the caustic dye from my scalp, until I realized it was not Yolanda but Ting. After Yolanda blasted my hair dry and sculpted it into place with gel, she said, “Go ahead, take a look.”
I was now a platinum blonde, my hair shorn to a shaggy, asymmetrical pixie cut, the left side mowed to a fuzz from my ear to the side part, hair sweeping over the crown of my head like Dr. Panzov’s comb-over, bangs spiking down my forehead. The hair matched my nose but not the rest of my face, my eyes peering forlornly from the raccoon mask of bruises, my mouth confused.
“Very nice,” I mumbled, turning away.
Flicking her wrist to consult her tiny watch, Yolanda strutted toward the door, throwing each long leg out with martial exuberance. “Madam would like you to report for work tomorrow. I’ll fetch you when she’s ready.”
“Will that be in the morning or afternoon?” I asked.
“What?” She spun back to face me, voice broadcasting the irritation that her face couldn’t.
“When will she be ready?”
Rolling her face up to the heavens, or at least to the camera, she let out an exasperated sigh. “Your job is to be ready for Madam whenever she summons you to her presence. She doesn’t accommodate your schedule, you accommodate hers.”
Finally she was gone, but still I waited a few minutes to make sure she didn’t pop back in like the scary clown in a slasher flick before picking up Great Expectations, eager to lose myself in Pip’s upside-down, inside-out adoption story, wherein an anonymous benefactor has Pip searching for his identity in all the wrong places. I loved this book. It was, in fact, the book that I based my own novel on, with an A. S. Byatt Possession-like twist in the form of a Victorian poet named Evander Cadamon in the place of Pip.
Despite my mom’s pleas to return home, I stayed in New York, determined to meet Mindy’s challenge and fucking write. I signed up with a temp agency, and when there was no work, I wrote. To make things a little easier for myself, I used Great Expectations, a childhood favorite, as my template, but in an attempt to mask my purloined plot, I made my protagonist a tortured poet who wrote in haiku, both to bring an Asian element into the story and because haiku was much less difficult to write than Victorian poetry. Evander Cadamon was a mishmash of Pip (an orphan in search of himself), Nigel (brilliant and pale), my Victorian poetry professor Dr. Evander (British and enigmatic), and myself (vague and unformed), and each chapter opened with one of his haikus that foreshadowed the next plot twist, an authorial artifice of which I was particularly proud.
For the first time in my life, I woke up every morning with a clear purpose, which summoned in me some hidden strength that I’d never even suspected I had. I cherished that purpose, held it close, and it became my protector, my accomplice, and my sanctuary. As the word count of my manuscript grew and the story took shape, I found some sort of redemption from the mess I had made of my life so far. Writing required all those things that I had, until now, avoided: self-discipline, dedication, organization, insight, and thoughtfulness. Though I sometimes missed the companionship of the pills and the booze, I told myself that writing was a lonely endeavor, and if I was no good at being lonely then I was no good at being a writer, embracing the loneliness as proof that I was succeeding at my craft. I didn’t need friends, I didn’t need fun; all I needed was to write. I stumbled occasionally—the worst was when I finished the first draft and celebrated with an entire bottle of Stoli, waking the next morning severely hungover and ashamed, the day wrecked for writing.
After a year, my novel was a living, breathing thing, still a jungle of words, sure, but one that I had willed into existence, the evidence there in the computer files, hundreds of pages that told a story I had spun out of thin air. Every single word was one that I had birthed onto the page, every character my own creation, every action brought to life by me. I labored over every sentence, again and again, fashioning and refashioning the same scene, the same character, the same gesture, replacing the clumsy with the mediocre, the mediocre with the good, the good with the inspired. Another year, and the jungle of words became an overgrown weedy patch, the weedy patch a cultivated garden. Each polishing made the story shine just a little more, until I deemed it a brilliant gem ready to be shared with the world. Two years after Mindy issued her directive, I emailed the first chapter to her. It was not a well-chosen time: Mindy was in the midst of grueling clinical rotations and running on a serious sleep deficit, but I didn’t think about that; I could only think of my manuscript, I could only think of myself.
One agonizing day later with no response, I sent her a text: “Have you read it yet?”
Silence. Doubt set in. What if she thought it was so bad she was avoiding me? Maybe she realized that after all these years of encouraging me to write, I just didn’t have the talent, and she felt too guilty to face me. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt me by giving her honest opinion.
I sent another text: “That bad huh?”
Nothing. Anger prickled my fingers into typing: “I can take the truth.”
Another day went by. I called her from the dental office where I was on a two-week assignment, just to see if she was screening my calls, but her phone went straight to voice mail again, and I left another passive-aggressive, borderline nasty message. My anger congealed like a cannonball in the pit of my stomach, and I dragged it everywhere I went, exhausted by its adamantine weight. I stopped trying to contact her, returning home from the dentist’s office to continue revising the manuscript, losing myself in what had once again become a jungle of words, trying to make order of the teeming growth, becoming tangled in my own vines, suddenly seeing only flaws where previously I had seen perfection. It was that quick, like waking from an enchantment: my confidence evaporated, the rose-colored glasses through which I read my own words shattered, and suddenly everything I’d written didn’t make any sense to me anymore, and what I thought was treasure was revealed to be trash. A few short days of silence from Mindy, and it was all gone. I bought a bottle of vodka (Popov, because there was nothing to celebrate this time) and continued revising my novel, because I wasn’t yet ready to admit to the world, and to myself,
that it was no good, but now I was drinking and writing, waking up the next morning to delete everything I had done the day before, a loop-the-loop of writing and drinking and deleting.
When she finally called, Mindy’s voice was flat and scratchy from exhaustion. She apologized perfunctorily for not being in contact sooner, but she had just had the rotation from hell and began to describe the boorish male attending physician who talked over her whenever she opened her mouth, when I cut her off. “You hated it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I just said I hated it,” she responded, yawning. “The guy was an asshole.”
“Not the rotation, Mindy. The first chapter of my novel that I sent you.”
“Oh. I haven’t read it yet.”
“Seriously? You couldn’t bother to read forty pages? They’re even double-spaced, so that’s like twenty pages! You couldn’t do that for your best friend?”
“Lisa, I’ve just explained to you what I was doing. I’ve slept about six hours in the last four days. I’m totally exhausted.”
“You’re the one who told me to fucking write, remember that? So I fucking wrote, and you didn’t even bother to fucking read it!”
“Oh my god, Lisa, are you really yelling at me?” Her words began to bubble wetly over the phone. She was crying. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in months, I hardly ever see Trip, and now you’re yelling at me? I think you might possibly be the most selfish person in the whole world.”
And then the line went dead. Mindy had hung up on me.
Famous Adopted People Page 23