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Page 9
Camille, on the other hand, became insatiable. Her eyes were fierce slits more often than not and the many attractions that had delighted Mac’s easy Isabelle did not satisfy Woo’s impossible bride. No roller coaster was fast enough, no carousel horse the right color. He won carnival game after carnival game, but none of the fun prizes caught her eye. The cotton candy was too sweet, the popcorn too salty, the petting zoo full of nothing but farm animals. “Where are the pandas?” she cried. “Why can’t we go dancing?”
She began demanding more and more—she wanted dinners out and movies, museum tickets and dancing—a number of items that were not on their itinerary nor part of their detailed budget. She wanted Iowa City instead of Des Moines, Badger Creek instead of Lake Anita, Kansas instead of Nebraska. All of it arbitrary, Woo was convinced. All of it designed to madden him. The more she asked for, the more he refused. This he did not out of spite but on principle. There were times when he adored her fierceness and longed to turn the car in any direction she wanted to go, but his principles outweighed his adoration for her and he drove on.
When they arrived at the Motel 6 in Des Moines, she refused to get out of the car. “Why do we always have to stay at Motel 6? I don’t want to stay at another one.” She had her sandaled feet on the dash to spite him and was looking at the map through the slits of her eyes as if plotting an alternate route.
“Motel 6, what’s the problem? We have reservations.” Woo didn’t understand. What a nice clean motel! The night before had been particularly tender and unsatisfying and their daytime personalities were revolting.
“I don’t mind staying in a few here and there, but every single time? What will people think?”
“What people?!” Woo shouted, incredulous.
And then, for the first time since their journey west had begun, Camille understood that she was stranded. There were no other people. No Heartland, no mother, no father, no movie dates or trinkets, white rabbits or dried plums—just a husband. She began to cry.
There was nothing, aside from sex and communism, that frightened Woo more than tears and so while Camille wept over the road atlas, he went into the Motel 6 office and canceled their reservations. He got on Interstate 80 going west and began searching for signs to Lake Anita.
It was at Lake Anita (for which he had silently sacrificed the highly touted Badger Creek) that Woo and Camille encountered a handful of those “people” whom Camille had unwittingly referred to, just thirty miles earlier, as if her naming of them had made them exist. The incident, which Woo was loath to recall in detail, involved a group of four ten-year-old boys who suddenly and in symphony threw wet stones at Woo’s sweatered back while he was at the edge of what he thought was a desolate thicket, relieving himself. He was in midstream when the first stone struck, though his sweater cushioned the stone’s impact and distracted him from seriously considering its source. Ping! Ping! The second and third struck in quick succession and then a shower of smaller stones, also wet, hit him like rain. The usual racial epithets were hurled as well and then as quickly as they had ambushed their man, the boys vanished into the thicket. Ha ha, ha, he could hear them, heh, heh, heh.
Woo did not let the incident disrupt him. He finished out the stream, shook and tucked himself in, button, then zipper, then belt.
Camille, who had watched through the car windshield, sprang up out of the car when he returned. She rushed up to him and kissed him on the cheek. It was a kiss of the same variety as the kiss in the hotel room, the sort she spontaneously doled out on rare occasions.
“Why didn’t you yell at those lousy jerks?” she asked.
“This is minor incident. Too much trouble for nothing,” he said, alluding to a wider spectrum of incidents she knew nothing about.
“Why didn’t you at least tell them you aren’t Japanese?”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
She bit her thumbnail and looked down at his sweater, which he had taken off and folded.
“Why were you wearing that sweater? It’s so hot! If I was a man, I’d take my shirt off.”
“No such a thing. It is unsafe to expose oneself in an isolated location. Hot, cold, doesn’t matter.”
“Gosh, that’s so paranoid,” she said. He had looked so funny in that sweater, standing in the August sun.
After the two of them were in the car again, she watched his black eyes scan not just the unknown road in front of them but both mirrors and the shoulders too. From time to time he looked briefly at her face. She saw that he too was stranded. No Chinatown, no bachelors, no newspaper, no plums. In the cities and towns to come, who would understand him? Who, if not she, would keep him safe?
SO IT WAS that the newlyweds, each marooned in their own way, made of the time remaining a temporary life. He drove the car he had given her that she was incapable of driving and she held in her small lap the many maps he had purchased for his own private pleasure. They ate fresh fruit and dry cereal for breakfast, according to his taste, and they stopped at McDonald’s for lunch, according to hers. They adhered to Mac Celan’s list of restaurants for dinner, less because their tastes correlated with his or Isabelle’s and more to prevent disagreement between them. Woo misplaced Celan’s list of favorite destinations and it was just as well.
In Nebraska, he bought her a set of checkers and it became their habit to play in the motel room after dinner. Sometimes while they played, they sipped ginger ale poured from cans into complimentary tumblers filled with complimentary ice. The ring-shaped pieces of ice, which Camille loved to slide on her fingers, Woo retrieved from a metal machine every evening. It was Camille’s duty to take as many complimentary postcards from the Motel 6 lobby as was appropriate, according to the number available and the clerk’s disposition. When she was bored, which was seldom, she shined his shoes, for he loved his shoes to be shiny but disliked blackening his hands. And when he was feeling tender (also seldom) he ran her a bath.
Their German engine rumbled and coughed and dust flew through the open windows. They were always in the car unless it was evening and because of this, Woo felt dirty at the end of each day. She learned that his sweat, like water, had almost no discernible odor; he learned that she hummed while she ate. He sensed at times that she was homesick; she began to suspect that he dyed his hair. Both grew accustomed to the sound of traffic roaring past them, the sounds of “people” motoring swiftly and mysteriously past them, even as they slept. The bright red-orange 6 became a beacon to both, though it meant something different to each of them. They exhausted their supply of prophylactics and did not buy more. It was difficult to connect that which they did in the dark with their nomadic sunlit selves.
Their conversations quieted and then ceased and that was for both of them an unexpected comfort. And then one morning they crossed the California state line and Woo said, “Tonight we will be home.” And Camille said, not without a sadness, that she had lost track of the days and in so doing, had almost forgotten where it was they were going.
Post Trauma
Rajiv Mohabir
I spent the summer wearing the stink into the soles until the bottom of my loafers dropped out under the big toe’s heel. O Corona, Corona, the black crows ties to my feet—I flew the 7 train to Junction Boulevard into the mariachi of chili and lime on corn on the cob to peck the grains along the rails. Until February’s slush tumbled white first then a black wet; I was born in February my afterbirth a murder lifting like a could in caws. That winter my mother refused closed-toe shoes. Rats froze in Queens gutters, blanketed, cell walls broken by ice, and starved. I didn’t have much to eat, just a bag of beans and basmati, just cumin without other spices. Somewhere in Queens my aunts curled their lips, sneered my name, drew their curtains tight, the eyes of their homes shut and blind to me. The lentil grains broke into mush then grew cold, crows in the daal, my feet black and aching.
Costero
Rajiv Mohabir
Also called a Guiana dolphin
because of its
coast hugging
and riverine disposition,
the Costero’s shape echoes
a bottlenose except
it’s 6.9 feet long and so terrified
of humans it flees from boats
at the slightest whir
despite being a true
Delphinidae: estuarine and
electroreceptive from Nicaragua
to Brazil. Its cousin the Tucuxi
may be more of a sister
or faggoty brother: pink skin
to the Costero’s blue. In fact
scientists only recently began
rent these two subspecies
into two distinct kinds—
but who knows if they breed
or produce viable offspring?
There is no “true” of any hyper-
sexual order. It’s easy
to be mistaken for something
you’re not. People think
I am Indian when I am clearly
Guyanese. When I say Guyana
they repeat the colonial name
Guiana or even Ghana. Few know
about Indians abroad and read
foreignness for queerness, assuming
I am straight when clearly
borders are only asymptotes.
Pygmy Right Whale
Rajiv Mohabir
It’s the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around.
—Felix Marx, of the University of Otago, Aotearoa
So much is not clear
of ancient lineage. Is the ocean
too rich with nutrients or
is the whale’s molecular
makeup and bone structure
not echoed in any other
species? A question puzzles
scientists for many years.
This smallest of baleen
whales they assumed it to belong
to the Right Whale’s taxonomic
category despite its falcate
dorsal fin, its mouth’s curve
serving as a shibboleth.
What we can’t make out
at first sight our brains
assimilate like how once
Justin imitated what he thought
an “Indian” sounds like
to mock my mother, whose
actual speech, like hurricane
or storm-bird, is from continents
away. I don’t like Muslims
he said. What did he know
of kinds: coolie or desi, or
what foreignness obscured
my desire for the neighbor boy?
He could have called me many
convenient things. Come to find out
all of the Pygmy Right Whale’s
genus have died out leaving no
trace of family Cetotheriidae—
its name scientists call
a “wastebasket” genus like the term
“South Asian” or “Middle
Eastern” or “faggot”
a category used to classify
what brown they see
and do not understand.
कालापानी
Rajiv Mohabir
का मतलब पानी है काला
या वे पार करने वाले
पार करके काला हो जाते हैं
का मतलब राज़ रिवाज़ भूलना
का मतलब बदलाव
का मतलब अंधेरा, का
मतलब रात का मत
लब सूर्यास्त, का मतलब जनम
छोड़ना, का मतलब खो जाना
अपने आपको, का मतलब पानी
सांस में, का मतलब नाम
खोना, का मतलब अनाथ बनना, का
मतलब कुली नाम लेना, का
मतलब पीठ तोड़ने की महनत,
का मतलब नाना नानी आजा आजी
की पसीना, का मतलब
गयाना, का मतलब नया दिन, का
मतलब अमरीका का
मतलब जलयात्रा का
मतलब ज़िंदा रहना, का मतलब
कला जो पूर्वज के माथे का कालापानी से
आयी है, का मतलब
कहानी का शुरूआत, का
मतलब सूर्योदय
Kalapani
Rajiv Mohabir
means water’s black
or that sea crossers
blacken, means to forget
secrets and rituals, means
conversion, means darkness,
means night means
sunset, means giving up
this life, means to lose
yourself, means water
in the breath, means losing
your name, means being orphaned means
taking the name “coolie” means
breaking your back from work,
means your grandparents’ sweat, means
Guyana, means a new day, means
America, means sea voyage,
means to remain living, means
art from your ancestors’ sweat
which was its own
kind of kalapani, means
the story’s beginning, means
sunrise
The Unintended
Gina Apostol
21. Magsalin, translator (and aspiring mystery writer), tardily mourns the death
Magsalin, uncertain of her future in a Third World order, had grown up with intense though scattered academic desire. It does not help that her childhood included the streets of Harvard, in Cubao, and New York, in Cubao, two dark corners of cartographic humor that, as is often the case in the Philippines, actually exist.
Poststructuralist paganisms, the homonymic humor of Waray tongue twisters (which descend, as always, into scatology), French novelists, Argentine soccer players, Indonesian shadow puppets, Indo-European linguists, Dutch cheeses, Japanese court fictions, and mythopoeic animals in obscure Ilocano epics indiscriminately gobbled up her soul.
It is not an uncommon condition, this feeling of being constructed out of some ambient, floating parts of the Internet. (So glum scholars of the Anthropocene appraise this unsettled, textual state.)
Some of her youthful attachments were fetishistic, while others were just symptoms of malnutrition.
She adored the concept of signs, without acknowledging the need to understand it.
On a Tumblr blog, now deactivated, Magsalin notes that her youth in Manila is lost, and sadly she now only annotates a past paved with sacral relics of bookish bones merged with atrocities of “daily praxis” (a kind of evil, undefined).
I will list here only a partial list of her old Tumblr tristesses:
The retirement of Franco Baresi, sweeper, of AC Milan, in 1997 (she used to follow Serie A before the referee scandals and the monopoly of the sport in Asia by Sky TV);
Random apostrophes on giant Nestlé powdered milk advertising billboards that dominate the ride from Manila’s airport;
The death of Wilfrido Nolledo, author of But for the Lovers, his Philippine masterpiece reissued too late by Dalkey Archive Press and out of print, of course, in his home country;
Brutal attacks by nice fellow writers at international writing workshops in Iowa, after which she drinks warm Bud Lights with the neoliberal fuckers filled with postcolonial melancholia anyhow;
Readers who declare you cannot truly understand the works of the novelist Jose Rizal if you read him only
in translation—a bullshit excuse for not reading him at all;
Bloggers who keep announcing the end of print books while deploring print’s extinction;
Finding the mismarked grave of Antonio Gramsci (the map said Giacometti) under the shade of outcasts in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome;
The word “praxis”;
Readers who ask, Why do you always bring up Philippine history that no one knows anything about?
Good writers, even white males, who are prematurely dead.
Hirsute, looking practically flammable on his book jackets, Stéphane Réal died, so to speak, in medias script. One might say, dying of lung cancer, he vanished in a puff of smoke. One imagines the last sight of him was his demonic beard, a fey salt-and-pepper affair, the color of pumice or a crosswise shard of culvert (like those abstract tarred bits lying for months off of Café Adriatico, still unswept after the June rains). In the shape of a scudetto, the beard, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, is the last to disappear. A number of his works, journals, jottings, juvenilia, are illuminating, in a haphazard way. Réal’s last novel, a mystery, remains a puzzle. It is unfinished. Having occurred before the diaspora of cultural philosophers to the World Wide Web, his death was a conundrum of the analog kind. His stack of papers, Magsalin imagined, would need dusting.
There is a sense that young Magsalin, a poor and underfed student in the eighties, would not have minded a ticket from Manila on Air France, or even Etihad or Emirates, straight to Nice or Cap d’Antibes, where she would first lie languid on the beach for a day, the sun being the best antidote to jet lag, then rent a cheap car to traverse horseback-riding campsites and haute corniches through the vals and valses of the middling Midi and on down the horrible French nuclear scenery into the bowels of Paris.
She would drop off at Pére Lachaise, with the help of the TomTom® App for Finding Dead Writers Who Are Still Members of the Group Blank-Blank-Blank, and she would genuflect before his jar of ashes (or columbarium, as it is called in Wikipedia), in between staring at the not-so-subtle winged sphinx of Oscar Wilde’s last riddle and Gertrude Stein’s soothing, but pebbly, grave.