All Roads Lead to Blood

by Chau, Bonnie;

  The Very End Part

  Sunday morning she called out sick from work. The naked ghost man was nowhere to be found. A ghost of a ghost—how was this even possible? She sat on her bed, legs undercover, cold light leaked leaflessly through the cold window glass pane. She went on Facebook and looked up Jason the Mason. She selected him from a short list of Jasons. She sat across from his photo, a photo in which he smiled head-on, straight-on, unblinkingly, smiling his usual mouth-closed smile, his usual smile, which looked like a U, like the mouth on a smiley face. He was sitting at a wooden picnic table, it looked like the back patio of some bar in Oakland or Berkeley or San Francisco, holding a pint of beer, typical.

  What was special about this photo was that it had been posted by his new wife whom he had just met on a bus five months prior, who probably took it, who probably was sitting straight across the table from him, who was probably the person he was looking at, head-on, and smiling at, that usual U-shaped smiley face smile.

  And this special photo, she had posted on his page, and posted it with a heart, and underneath, were a couple likes, and a handful of comments from his mother and sister who were always commenting, and from his wife, who was always responding to comments by his mother and sister and sometimes his father too, and a few comments here and there from his friends, some of whom were like EW OH U GUYS, aka stop being so sick and so corny, how do you live like this, how can you live like that? was what she was thinking, sitting by herself on her bed on a cold February morning, instead of making money at her job, at one of her two part-time jobs, and she was thinking:

  I suppose it’s best that we ended, I could never stand his looks, the way he looked at me.

  I suppose two corny people found each other.

  There is nobody else in the room with me.

  There is nobody else taking a photo of me.

  I am smiling, in a beautiful, open-mouthed way, at nobody. And then re-worded:

  I am not smiling, in a beautiful, open-mouthed way, at anybody.

  Loose Morals

  Do you think that’s funny? the Detective’s mouth was very close to her ear, and instead of shouting, he seemed to be stroking the words along his vocal cords, his throat, coaxing them along, like a hand caressing gravel.

  No, the Hussy sobbed. She splayed her hands on the smooth hardness of the concrete wall. And yet she had been laughing, but didn’t the man know that laughing and hurting stood back to back, laughter and tragedy, laughter and guilt, menace, blood?

  Loose morals, they had chorused. Loose morals, the Detective muttered into her ear now. She stifled a hysterical sound. She twitched her hips back and forth, stomped her feet. It was Amendment #1362 that she had broken. Loose morals, Amendment #1362. Commoners called it the Carpet-Drapes Anomaly; the more rotten, post-millennial crowd referred to it as the Streets-Versus-Sheets Anomaly. Question number one: does your sexual behavior match your public persona, your most ostensible self? Question number two: if they set the Detective loose on you, will you behave? Question number three: can they find a way, a reason to lock you up?

  She had been caught strolling up and down Robertson Boulevard, just one block west of the old Beverly Center mall, in sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt that read UCLA Bruins Athletics Department 1994. The surveillance cameras had shown her to be guilty of a mismatch: that space—the gap, the slit, the pussyhole catcunt—had on numerous past occasions—recorded occasions—proven culpable, capable of being both slice-knife sharp (intercourse that drew bloody scratches), and also muffled-soft engulfing (intercourse like the wet, matted-fur undulations of mammalian beasts). Not only did the Hussy’s sweatpants and shower slippers belie her sexual nature, but she seemed horrifically—illegally—mutable within her sexual deviancy.

  The Hussy pressed her hot cheek against the concrete so that she could stare the Detective full in the face. His eyes narrowed at her, he was thinking things about her, he must have been running an old TI-82 brain, which was not compatible with the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at one time. The Resistance group had a perpetual huddle of techno-engineer nerds who worked on research and construction of brain upgrades, though there were inevitable failures of technology to capture and/or analyze the subtleties of morals, loose or firm. There was the tragedy of the Resistance Leader’s Daughter, for instance, who had assassinated the former Police Chief, and then been accidentally taken out by one of the updated Resisters who had read—incorrectly—her flirtations while she was still undercover. An old, natural brain would never have made such an error.

  She squirmed, and drawing her knee up as tightly and forcefully against the wall as she could, she let snap suddenly the heel of her foot backwards and up, into the groin of the Detective. He let out a small oof, a soft small boy sound, and then stumbled back slightly into the shadows of the overhang; in such shadows, his own five-o’clock shadow looked especially sinister.

  The Detective recovered himself and returned to her, the hard fabric planes of his uniform once again abrading her back. He trained his chameleon eye on her. It was one of the New World Order government’s first mandates for law enforcement Detectives to be staffed by officers with implanted chameleon eyes. This must be a joke, the citizenship incanted. It was not enough of a joke. They said people with chameleon eyes would be able to see everything. Nothing would escape notice. Surveillance at all angles.

  The Detective rummaged around behind the Hussy’s back. She rubbed her cheek against the concrete wall, hoping for the sting of breaking skin to bring something sharp into focus. He brought out the law book. Time for a read-aloud.

  He paged through the book, paper sounds, thumbing sounds, and began intoning.

  Mumbojumbomumbojumbo, he muttered against her ear. Amendment #1362, he jabbered. Loose morals, they chorused.

  The old law books were written in the language of the New World Order’s previous incarnation, the Old World Order. That language had been extinct from everyday usage for six hundred years.

  She listened to the wash of mumbojumbo, and was led away. He propelled her down the cement hallway, through a pile of ramps and passages and narrow corridors that intersected at haphazard crossings, as if laid down in the shape of pick-up sticks mid-game.

  *

  ZOOMPP ZOOMPP, the wall thudded. Question number four: how much time had passed? The Hussy squirmed around in the small cot in the cell, and turned toward the noise. The small opening between her cell and the next cell was reverberating with the thudding. She peered up and through the hole in the wall and came face to face with a woman in a red hooded cape.

  Red Widow, she said by way of introduction. Hussy, the Hussy said. The Red Widow nodded. Yoohoo, Hussy said, Amendment #1362? The Red Widow nodded, and then lifted the red hood away and back from her head. Her hair was coiffed in perfect red waves.

  More specifically, we’re here for Sounds, the Red Widow informed her. Do you feel a beating pitter-pattering there between your legs, she asked her. The Hussy said nothing. Then she nodded. The other woman’s face, now no longer shadowed by the overhang of the hood, looked remarkably like her own face. Or, at least, like how her face looked the last time she had checked. Since that last time, she had been doled out punishment cuts to the cheeks, and her face was very likely no longer the same.

  We’re here for Sounds, the Red Widow said again. And then the Hussy understood. The women in this wing, all of them, had been booked for the same specific violation of Amendment #1362—for a Sensation #4 Mismatch: Sounds/Hearing. Her sexual sounds had not matched her sweatpants.

  The Hussy realized her hands had curled and bunched into fists. She and the Red Widow stared at each other through the opening. The Hussy began laughing, and the Red Widow joined in. Others down the entire corridor of cells also began to laugh. Then, the Hussy screamed. She screamed for blood. As blood. As sharp, wet beast. And down the corridor, the othe
rs began screaming too; the sounds pulsated, louder and louder.

  Year Of Righteousness, Year Of Confetti

  In the car on the way home from LAX, my father is driving and he and my mother are talking about how when the two of them go to the airport to catch a flight these days, these years, they have to call a cab. “It’s very expensive, twenty bucks, so forty bucks there and back,” my mother says. I ask calmly, “You can’t ask a coworker to take you?”

  “It’s a hassle,” she says.

  Why is there nobody, is all I can think. I ask, “Well, has anything new opened in Irvine?” And so we talk instead about the arrival of new restaurants, new branches of large corporations, new buildings.

  In the guest bedroom where I am staying are hung framed paintings and illustrations I did in high school, that can pass as somewhat decent. I unzip my luggage and pluck out the bag of toiletries, leaving undisturbed the rest of the huge lump of clothing I’d forcefully compacted into the bottom half of the suitcase. I lie down in the bed. There are many decisions we make that lead to there being nobody.

  In the morning, I am reminded by the light beaming in through the blinds that this is indeed Orange County, California, and I have indeed moved back in with my parents, and this is my life. In my bitterness, I grimace at the window and accuse the sunlight of feeling clean and suburban.

  The next week, it’s cold. June gloom. My feet are freezing and by noon, I’m still in my pajamas, unshowered, listening to my European playlists. I wouldn’t mind a cocoon for a room, boiled wool walls, white sheets, smoothly curved vertices. I would feel better about languishing if it were appropriately hot here. It’s not appropriately hot. It’s very cold. There’s a lot of construction that happens, and construction-related sounds. Although the homeowner’s association ensures that it only happens during restricted hours, Mondays through Saturdays 8–6, none on Sundays.

  I think about Budapest, Croatia, Romania, Berlin, Turkey, the bug in the soup I had in Sofia. I think about Morocco, and about getting konnichiwa yelled at me more times than I could have ever imagined, and I thought I could imagine a lot. I think about circling the Colosseum slowly, completing only about a third of an arc around its circumference, in the pouring rain. I think about other things I have done in the pouring rain: leaned over the railing along the river in Prague, walked home through the hilly sidewalks of Westwood from the UCLA campus, made out with a guy on a rock at a beach somewhere along the central coast of California. I imagine that in the pouring rain, my eyes look shiny, a stone fountain maiden blinded by water. I imagine that in the pouring rain, I disintegrate more slowly than usual, that maybe we all do.

  Stuck at my parents’ house, I try to recreate a very particular atmosphere, playing French electropop, in the tiny guest bedroom with its glass-topped desk and a cushioned swivel office chair digging itself into four tiny graves in the beige carpet. The music doesn’t sound right, against this glass desk, against the cracks of light coming in through the white window blinds, it doesn’t sound right with construction roaring monotonously.

  *

  I get a part-time job in retail, at an expensive women’s apparel and home accessories store. I have to look nice and put-together there, and emanate warmth and encouragement in the dressing room. I get to be the opposite of myself there.

  “So what’s your story? Are you in college? Taking some time off from school? What’re you up to?” another new girl asks during training. Someone named Hailey or Heidi or Holly is giving us an overview of the company’s general history and philosophy, but I am really only looking forward to the part on protocol to follow if we suspect we see a shoplifter—there are code words involved.

  “Oh, no, no,” I laugh good-naturedly, from deep within my retail customer service Bright Mode. “Done with college long ago,” I say, but I hope not in a mean, condescending way, not an oh-I’m-so-far-advanced-beyond-college-and-you kind of way, because that’s not at all what I mean. What I mean is, are you fucking kidding me, I’m Chinese and from Irvine, which means I graduated from a respectable four-year university when I was twenty-one, no questions asked.

  While we are sitting there, in our training circle, one of the managers tells us she did voices for toys when she was younger. Everybody nods gamely. I am the only one who speaks up to ask, “Um, what does that mean, voices for toys?”

  At my job in that store, dressed in narwhal-print silk blouses and palazzo pants and spouting all sorts of nonsense to women in the dressing room, I am suddenly outspoken. I will say anything to circumscribe this new opposite self into place.

  It keeps me busy, being there.

  *

  The week before leaving for Europe was full of frantic packing. One night, I met up with Sam for drinks. The circumstances felt abnormal. To have known each other from work, and now, suddenly, we had to exchange phone numbers, and now, suddenly, I was straightening up my kitchen, my coffee table, and now, suddenly, he was calling because he was lost, and look, I was answering my phone for once, fascinated that this small event had officially started, and I slid my feet into my flip-flops, ran out the front door, out the front garden, into the bright May dusk, the asphalt hill of my lovely palm-tree-lined street empty as usual, downtown high-rises stretching smoggily over behind the hill, and I took leaping giant steps in my miniskirt, in the middle of the street, around the curve.

  This was what it was like, when you had quit your job, when you hadn’t started your new one yet, which was part-time anyway and in another country, and you had nothing you had to do but meet up with Sam and walk down the hill from your house to Sunset Boulevard and drink $2.50 margaritas that would surely give you headaches that unfurled like giant night-blooming flowers.

  *

  My cousin Lana came to visit me in Marseille during her winter break, and we decided to go to Paris for New Year’s. It turned out Sam was going to be in Paris at the same time, to interview someone for his dissertation. I tried to explain to Lana who this friend was. “A work acquaintance from home, from L.A. Well, a friend. But you don’t know him. Actually, I don’t know him that well, I’ve technically hung out with him once, and that one time, I slept with him.”

  Lana and I were staying with Alex, my supervisor’s son who lived in Paris. He had a sort of intense, smoldering stare that I felt like I had seen more on Frenchmen than elsewhere, but it’s possible I am just myth-building. Most of this staring was directed at Lana. She had no idea. The first chance we got to ourselves, I asked her what she thought of him. “I think he likes you,” I said. Nobody made much of this, but I knew it. I had seen his gaze, hovering mid-air, meeting nothing, falling short, emanating from one side only, lots of times. It made me slightly sick, slightly sympathetic. I didn’t say anything else. But I didn’t have to, the way the weekend continued. I felt vindicated, more and more. In life, I was often wrong, but the more time passed, the more I was sure I was right about this one thing.

  For New Year’s Eve festivities, Alex invited us to his friends’ house party, and I invited Sam. Not too long into the evening, it was visible even to the naked eye of any drunken innocent bystander, how hard Alex was trying to hit on Lana, and how uninterested she was. For much of the night, I sat slouched in the crummy depths of a red couch next to three girls playing a Wii game that involved cooking, using the Wii gadget like a beater, or like a frying pan handle, or cracking open eggs. I was eating imitation crab sticks which were all the rage in France—they ate them like potato chips. Or rather, I ate them like potato chips: plain. They ate them like crudités: with a white sauce dip. Sam came over and sat down, not bothering to gesture for me to give him room, just wedging himself into the narrow space between me and the armrest at one end. He held out his hand. I looked down, clearly, clear-eyed, feeling not quite cold-sober, but seeing the hand, and seeing myself see the hand. I placed my hand, open, to meet his, just for a moment.

  I looke
d around warily, expecting to see Alex hitting on Lana in some lurid corner. At the same time, I had to deal with other things. I couldn’t fucking blow that balloon. I was allergic to the unseen cat. I couldn’t stop eating those surimi sticks, even though they were covered in confetti I had to pick off before I could eat them. I really wanted to start smoking cigarettes, and there was no one to stop me.

  Sam stuck his head into the space between my shoulder and neck, his long moppy curls feeling cool, and he leaned in closer, sticking his hand out again. I couldn’t see his face. Or, I made sure not to look at his face. I stood up, headed out to the balcony.

  *

  A week after my re-entry into the U.S., my mother and father and I pick up my grandparents and take them to lunch in Hacienda Heights. I help my grandma in and out of the car, and I help her buckle her seatbelt. Afterwards, my father asks me if my grandparents seem to have aged a lot this time, after seeing them for the first time in a year. “Yes,” I say, and don’t say anything else, even though he leaves room there to say something else. But I don’t. I don’t know what to say. The room that is there has never before been big enough for me to jump into, leap into its depths, and it doesn’t change now. When the time has passed, he just nods, too. Actually it is more he and my mother who feel older to me, their bodies fragile, small as if I am seeing them from far away.

  People move or travel abroad and then return home a new person, transformed—this happens all the time. The first shower I took in my parents’ house was a revelation. The water pouring out of the showerhead was insanely pleasurable, extraordinarily abundant. I could barely handle it, the unwavering heat and force and density of all of this water, rushing at me. But after three days, I no longer noticed it at all.

  *

  I could feel it, I could see it, the dotted-line diagram, the indicator arrows, showing me desire and directional flow. I was standing outside on the balcony, it was the New Year, it was 1 a.m. and it was motherfucking cold, but I would have rather been in the motherfucking cold than been back inside inhaling the cat dander allergens that had been kicked up from all the hard-partying Frenchmen with their confetti-blowers and noisemakers. Sam pulled open the sliding glass door, I heard it rolling like so much machinery coming to life, he stepped out, his black coat’s collar cutting black wool angles on either side of his cheekbones. He had a cigarette wobbling between his lips, and his eyes hit mine for an instant, before he turned to push the door shut, and then stepped over to the far end of the balcony. Something rustled way down below us, near the train tracks. Where he was standing, in the corner, there was no glass, only the wall after the glass of the sliding doors had ended.