Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  You are in me.

  And you need to come out.

  She turns without a word from the doorway of the green room. You are four months old, she tells Granny Alma. Call Dr. Wee, who sits two pews in front of Granny at church every Sunday.

  He will suck you out of me.

  But you want to stay.

  Salamander fingers, you cling to my wet walls until your body rips apart. You are the color of tendon in my sweet stew, little pod, with eyes, black beads, like a rat’s. Your aunt Celeste’s lovely eyes.

  Love,

  Your mother, Sonia Kurisu, age 17

  I hate my sister Celeste. Celeste who always reminds me that she raised me the best she could. Poor thing. Poor her. The kind of girl who’s forced into substitute mommydom too early. Lots of sad stories about girls like her.

  She found our mother wedged between her bed and the wall, an empty vial of Seconal, bent spoon, lighter, and small syringe on the floor. Celeste was ten. I was nine.

  Grace was fading out, eyes rolling slowly, a groan, a mutter. We walked her dragging feet to the living room couch. Celeste put herself between Grace’s legs and held her body up against the picture window. Head floating on a neck made of rubber. “Call 911, you moron. Don’t just stand there.”

  Grace took several short gasps for air.

  Purple mommy.

  So I blew in her face. A long breath that she held, her head falling.

  “She’s leaving,” Celeste screamed. I dropped the phone, the cord spinning the receiver. And she was still.

  I saw the couch indent beside Grace. I smelled the rotting carcass of goat, a maggot-filled belly, the explosion of flies wet with intestinal fluid and excrement. Her head slid in the direction of the Specter. Celeste covered her nose and mouth.

  “Get up, Mommy, the Devil’s come to get you. Stand up, Mommy. Grace!” I screamed at her.

  I witnessed the summoning of the Seraphim as my mother willed her body to rise. She stumbled to the front door and leaned her body over the porch railing, her arms and head hanging. Breathing, breathing, until the ambulance rushed up our driveway and drove us all away.

  Who the fuck knows why the police called our Aunty Effie, who wasn’t even a real aunt, to take us to her house. Our stay would be indefinite. I heard her calling the church’s prayer tree late into the night.

  “Grace. That’s what I said. Grace Kurisu. The waitress at the 19th Hole. Painkillers and alcohol. She has that good-for-nothing husband. Oh, the big girl, Celeste’s, all right. She’s a strong Christian. Sonia, the little one, keeps talking about the Devil. The poor thing’s screwed up, I tell you. I’ll call Frannie and all the deacons.”

  She told the story of my mother over and over again to anyone and everyone who wanted to know every goddamn detail of our lives and the Appearance of the Angel of Death, in Hilo of all places.

  At eleven o’clock, the phone went still. I heard Aunty Effie brushing her dentures and a short time later, a muffled snore from behind her bedroom door. Celeste nudged me, motioning me to follow her. We left through the front door into the cool Hilo night and walked home.

  It was Celeste who walked me to school every day, fed me canned goods and rice for breakfast, and told me what to say when the CPS social worker came looking for us. She got me on the sampan bus after school, down the icy corridors of the hospital, and into the room where Grace spent the next six nights. Every night, we were deposited at Aunty Effie’s. And every night by twelve, Celeste made sure we slept in our own beds.

  Sister/Mother, it all sounds so loving.

  But she of the iron-fisted mommydom became the Sadist.

  And I of the get-the-shit/mind/soul-beaten-out-of-me-or-else became the Masochist.

  So your word, Celeste Kurisu-Infantino, twenty years later, I still fucking hate you, wife of Sicilian not Portagee, Michael Infantino; mother of Tiffany, fat and full of acne, and Heather who draws cat’s claws in God’s eyes, keep it for me, my: Sister/sadist.

  Dear Number One,

  So who am I to blame a substitute mother for your death by suction? She raised me the best she could, right?

  Love,

  Your Mom, Sonia, age now

  Now:

  I am on a black futon in a wet, warm room, red scarves over dusty lamps. Windows closed, curtains drawn, no sound but heartbeat and breath. Sonny Boy is asleep beside me.

  When will I stop fucking up?

  The pregnancy attention was what I wanted. I loved it. All of them giving me the best chair in the house. All of them putting pillows under my feet. All of them rubbing my belly for good luck. Feeding me, indulging me, venerating the earth mother. O, the possibility of bringing forth life from your body! they marveled.

  When will I wash my hair?

  Mark promised to buy a bottle of Prell, the fucking flake. My best, childhood forever friend, my little Markie, digging out on me every time I fuck somebody not to his liking. I miss him, I need him, I call him. But he’s gone.

  When will I stop fucking up?

  I’m too selfish to do this mommy shit. Mark could do it. Mark who mothered me over the years. Mark who fathered me over the years. Mark who brothered me over the years. Come back and take care of this fucking screaming baby. Come back and take care of me.

  When will the bleeding stop?

  This afterbirth blood smells rancid and old.

  When will I stop fucking up?

  This isn’t a dog I can tie up in the rain. Watch it shiver on a blanket soaked with urine and shit. Starve it, no money for dog food. Give it one kind pat a day. Beat the howling out of him. Watch him die. Bury him in the backyard. No more dog. Was tired of him anyway.

  When will I rest?

  My body aches from rocking, carrying, strolling, bouncing this boy who cries in steady, staccato bursts until he’s blue:

  Four to six in the evening, nonstop, he’s fucking shrieking.

  Ten to twelve, shut the fuck up, I put my hand over his mouth, dig my nails into his cheeks.

  Four to six in the morning, nauseated, I weave my fingers into his hair and squeeze.

  Ten to twelve, crying, I fall to the floor, watch him drop off the bed headfirst.

  And in between, he sleeps. Maybe.

  Overstim, they tell me. Darken the room. Talk in hushed tones.

  Colic, they tell me. Turn him on his belly. Turn him on his back. Don’t eat cabbage or refried beans.

  These days and nights that blur in a myopic haze. And no one to talk to but this horrible pod my body made.

  I hear somebody leaving next door. Lucky you.

  They’re all leaving Las Vegas. They write songs and movies about this phenomenon. Leaving Las Vegas with empty pockets, and the eternal struggle:

  Should I use my last dollar to eat a hot dog or put it in this slot machine? Dumb fuck, you should’ve eaten.

  I hear somebody moving in next door.

  And the mailman’s shoving envelopes under my door.

  A letter from my father, a man who knows about leaving. Lucky him. Never looked back. Never wanted to look back.

  Sweet Sonia,

  A man stands in front of an old Chinese hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A concessionaire sells him watermelon juice. The man takes in the smell of peanut pancakes, coconut rice, and goat curries.

  He’s looking for a place to spend the night in the midst of all the clatter and clang of the streets. The man wanders into a Chinatown. There’s a Chinatown in every city of this world.

  He finds a small Chinese hotel. Rooms, 25 ringgits, which is about four dollars. He sleeps early and long, full of rolls filled with chicken curry and cheeses. He drinks a delicious Chinese tea and falls into a steady slumber.

  The next morning, he wakes full of huge red welts and an incredible pain that pulses through his muscles and into his bones. Are these mosquitoes? He searches the space of the room.

  In the late afternoon, he passes a little mom-and-pop store full of cluttered shelves of strange bottles, du
sty cans, and the odor of fermenting fish and mint leaves. The old woman sells him a can of insect repellent.

  He returns to his tiny room overlooking a night market full of foreign sounds. The languages, sweet Sonia, the languages that he wishes to inhabit his body on lonely nights so he could speak to someone, these languages sound like music, like Italian opera or Hawaiian slack key. He knows the meaning of the melody from some place summoned inside his memory, and that he cannot understand the lyric does not matter.

  This night, the man sprays his room before retiring to the voices outside of his terrace window over the streets that skein into alleys and crossings. But as he dozes, bedbugs begin to drag themselves from the crammed space of the bed.

  These Malaysian bedbugs full of blood, his blood, are not lice with white, translucent bodies. These look like dog ticks, huge and gray, with two red lines on their backs that look like eyes. He presses into one of the dazed bugs and leaves the mark of his fingernail in its body. Hundreds of bedbugs pour out of the tears in the mattress.

  The man sleeps well this night.

  And the two red lines that look like eyes on the backs of the bedbugs? These are the marks on his body left by the bites—two tiny red lines etched all over him, front and back like shingles, the day he leaves Kuala Lumpur, languid and feverish.

  May this letter find you in good health.

  Your father,

  Joseph Kurisu

  I keep all of your letters, Father.

  You who I search for. You whose words find me. The beauty therein. The emptiness without.

  Now you keep this word: Seek/and/you/shall/find.

  Joseph left us for good in the time of blood. We all bled, Mama, Celeste, and I, the three house dogs, females in heat—stained panties, dog diapers, and sanitary napkin belts on the clothesline, bloody pads wrapped in newspaper in the trash. He had been planning to flee this all along, the bloodletting.

  Grace could’ve slit her veins and he’d have run.

  She came home from a long waitressing shift at the 19th Hole to find Joseph packing his duffel bag again. Hadn’t he told her he would be leaving?

  She said nothing to him. “Did you eat dinner?” she asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Dammit, Celeste, why didn’t you cook for your sister?”

  “Where’s Joseph going?” I whispered to my mother.

  “Did Jack’s call him today? Did he drive the Japan tour to the volcano?” she asked Celeste.

  “No, Mama,” she replied.

  I was eleven and bleeding for the first time. I hit myself over and over until my vagina bruised and swelled. I stayed home from school for days.

  Grace tore open a can of Spam and dropped the slabs of pink meat in sizzling oil. “Goddamn you, Celeste, can’t you even cook some rice?” she said, slamming dishes into the sink.

  “I’m out of here,” he’d said to me earlier that day.

  “Take me with you,” I begged. I’d skipped school. Joseph didn’t mind when he was the good father of some of my memory. Then, he loved the company. “Please, Daddy, don’t leave me.”

  “No room in my duffel,” he replied flatly.

  “Then put me in a box,” I told him. “I’ll be a good girl. I promise.”

  “You are a good girl,” he said, placing his warm hand on my face. “But Daddy’s traveling light. No room for you. Sorry, pal.”

  I grasped on to his hand. “You love me, Daddy?” I asked.

  “True love is freedom, kiddo,” he answered after a long silence. “Freedom with a capital F.”

  “Joseph!” my mother yelled. And when he didn’t answer, she picked up the empty Spam can and walked down the hallway. “Where the fuck are you going? How the hell am I going to pay the bills? Who’s going to take care of me?”

  “Get out of my face,” he said to her in his fierce monotone.

  I listened to the thud of her body against the wall. She slashed his face that night. He let her cut him open. Then he slung his duffel over his shoulder and turned once to look at me with vulnerable, fiery eyes, his hand stopping the bleeding. “See you, kiddo,” he said with a mock two-finger salute.

  Celeste clambered over the couch to stop Grace from hurting him more. I helped her pry the can from my mother’s fingers.

  “Run, Joseph, run!” I screamed. “Daddy!” I held out my arms to him. He paused for a moment, then turned toward the door.

  “Run, Joseph!” my mother cried. “Wake up, Sonia, you stupid little girl.” And then my mother turned her hatred on me. It would be days before I returned to school with black eyes and a bruised face. Celeste and I took the can from her fingers and laid her body down.

  “I’m sorry, Sonia,” she said. “Oh, look at your face. Celeste, baby, look at what I’ve done.”

  He was there, outside the picture window, looking back at the house he would not see for the next few years. I want to believe he placed it inside his memory for summoning on a lonely night. But he gave me that mock salute with a cocky smirk and a jerk of his eyebrows. I pulled the curtains shut.

  Dear #2,

  You are my second dead baby, another boy. Here is a picture of me the day before you died.

  I am in the small bedroom I grew up in at Granny Alma’s house. I’m in my embroidered jeans and hippie gauze blouse. I’m wearing a crocheted bikini top, rose-colored, black-rimmed shades perched on my head.

  There’s a green bamboo bead curtain hanging from the doorway, hanging ferns in macramé plant baskets.

  A long string of blinking Christmas lights encircling the windows. Fake snow sprayed on the jalousies.

  I’m burning coconut incense in a small brass urn. Sitting cross-legged, leaning against my bed covered with a paisley gauze bedspread.

  I’m reaching out one hand to you, see me, you must, and making a peace sign with the other.

  One day, #2, the word will parallel the image.

  Merry Christmas,

  Your mother, Sonia Kurisu, age 18

  I never celebrate Christmas. Never.

  I was twelve, Celeste thirteen. Joseph was gone.

  Sweet Sonia, the name I had given to the girl who received his letters, knew he was in Thailand. This was the year Grace brought home a five-foot Christmas tree, a small but beautiful tree, which cost us all possibility of our own presents wrapped in red and green ribbons.

  This was the tree she wanted to put in a rusty coffee can filled with rocks on the black lacquer table that Joseph had shipped back piece by piece from Chiang Mai. She wanted to give the illusion that it stood from floor to ceiling when we took the Christmas Eve photo, Celeste and I in red dresses, hiding the table with our bodies so he could see that fine tree, a Noble Fir.

  That fuck you, Joseph, tree. We’re doing just fine, you fucking selfish asshole.

  When Grace placed the tree on the table, the tip bent on the ceiling, sending asbestos snow into its branches. And Bing crooning I’m dreaming of a white Christmas on the Muntz stereo.

  “You don’t need the table, Mama,” Celeste suggested. “Why don’t you just put the tree on the floor. Never mind if it’s short.”

  She got her face slapped twice. I kept my mouth shut.

  “Go get me the hacksaw from outside, Sonia,” my mother said. “Get me a ruler from your schoolbag too.”

  My mother measured and marked. Her hair, flecked with rosewood, head down, wild hair jerking with the frantic tug of the hacksaw through wood. My mother cut off the legs of the lacquer table, one by one, wonderful smell of the fine rosewood and the snow of sawdust in our hair. In Celeste’s wet eyelashes, on her sweaty nose, dust in my cough, I tasted roses in my astonished mouth.

  We had no money whenever Joseph left us. He’d just leave.

  Celeste wore a velvet yoked muumuu with butterfly sleeves. Me, a red pinafore with a lacy white blouse, both charged at the National Dollar Store. Where would she send the pictures?

  “Stop, Mama. Please,” I whispered. “We don’t even know if D
addy—”

  “Shut your mouth, you hear me, Sonia? Smile, dammit. C’mon, Celeste, big smile. Look at the camera. Sonia, you knock off that crying.”

  Later that Christmas morning, with the money Granny Alma sent for Grace to buy presents for us from her, she bought two airline tickets. Two one-way tickets to Honolulu.

  At the airport, Grace was monotone. “Say goodbye to me,” she said. I stared at Celeste, my mouth agape.

  “Mama?” Celeste gasped.

  “I’ll send your things later,” she said, turning.

  “No, Mama. What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you sending us away?”

  She refused to answer me.

  “You take care of Sonia, Celeste. Tell Granny Alma she’s allergic to shrimp.” She gave her a push. “Go, there’s your flight.” Celeste took my hand in hers.

  “I hate you,” I said to my mother, who never turned back to look at me.

  So I say it every day. Every day until the day she turns to look at me and hear me. Listen, Mama, keep this word:

  Burn/in/Hell.

  WHAT IF MISS NIKKEI WERE GOD(DESS)?

  Karen Tei Yamashita

  March again already. Imagine. Another March, another year. Dekasegi are always counting the years like birthdays. For Miss Hamamatsu, this was year 3. She arrived in March on her fifteenth birthday, by most standards a fully formed woman. Blame it—womanhood, her full hips and breasts—on her Italian blood. Okay, blame her large dark eyes and her elegant nose on the Italians too. But the long silky black hair, the high cheekbones, the Shiseido perfect skin—blame that on the Japanese. She was that stunning mixture of Euro and Asian that feeds the filmic imagination. Her features represented the full measure of occidental beauty, all gracefully accented in the exotic. To top it off, she carried these Venus-like qualities with an easy Brazilian charm, as if the sun anointed her naked body, the sands and spume kissed her heels, her smile sparkled for everyone, and all of this in the middle of the industrial city, Hamamatsu, known as the home of Yamaha and Suzuki. Pianos and motorcycles. It all made perfect sense, for in Hamamatsu, among Brazilians who labored to produce those keyboards and racing monsters, and who likewise judged this contest of representative beauty at the local disco, she was known as Miss Hamamatsu ’96. High priestess of music and speed.