by Unknown
If there is one thing surviving disaster has taught me, it is that it has many names. Ma, for example, gestures to her misshaped mattress collecting years of amorphous spots. She points to its dents and cavities; says the word wool when she really means hole.
Similarly, our ghosts have their say. This, I learned after moving in with Ma to Building 4B, Apartment 9A of the Pomonok housing projects in the Lower East Side with a broken heart and two large trash bags of clothing. The ghost in the shape of Grandpa Why—my mother’s father born Li Wai Mo who eventually became a Walter, then a Wally, and then simply Why after none of the previous permutations seemed to stick—likes to throw open windows during those cloistered Tuesdays and shout to no one in particular “Ain’t that a stinker!” Meanwhile, the rain would leak inside and eat into Ma’s succulents. In frustration, she would jab at the air while Grandpa Why guffawed and danced around her. There are other ghosts too—too many to list here but two steady haunts in the form of Poltergeist Ike, a sensitive former butcher and Shin, an oversized cockroach, agree that this is just a simple catastrophe.
When I moved in, I did not tell Ma that Mal and I were not well. Two months into the city’s weekly acid rainstorms, we had exhausted the practice of using words as knives against each other and poured that energy into saving our little sinkhole. Mal was especially determined to protect the apartment with its rusty stovetop, leaky ceiling, and concave thin mattress that I had slowly been working my groove into for the past two years.
Because disaster called for teamwork, Mal took it upon herself to direct the placement of duct tape on windows in fear of shattered glass. She had a distinct aesthetic vision for it, wanting the X to reach each window corner exactly. At first, we were responsible for our own windows, but as hours passed, Mal saw the need to revise my efforts every so often to realign the X. In turn, I would go over her X, curling the letter deliberately. I designed a flower, a moth, and a claw. Then I made the shape of an angry lover’s mouth. Furious, she went over each one again, correcting the X until each window felt like a series of Nos.
“What if we die anyway?” I said. “Would God care how neat your Xs are? Really?”
During emergencies, it seems there is never a good or bad time to say anything. But then Mal finally said, “At least I’m trying to do something about it. What are you doing? You just keep shoving pots underneath leaks in the ceiling like somehow, after you empty all the water from the pots, it’ll all be over.”
She gripped her two fists like angry grapefruits when she spoke.
No, I thought. I am a person of action. I am a person of intent—a maker. I said instead, “I am a person.”
“What?”
“Talk to me like a person who is trying to deal, too.”
“You aren’t though,” she growled. “You keep fucking up the Xs!”
I would say later to myself it was the product of design that did us in—not the fact that we were illegally living in an apartment still registered under her grandma’s name and barely making rent, not my mother’s quiet homophobia, not the poverty of our sex that started out lusty and fevered and then gradually became lazy and perfunctory as the years wore on, not the knotted way her face looked when it raged against a fear she could not recognize, not the things she felt I owed, not the wind pattern or the acid rain or holes burned into bodies.
When I moved in with my mother, she was glad to have my strong, young hands knead her arthritic calves when they lose feeling in the night. Grandpa Why is content to have another person pouring him rice wine. I start reluctantly sharing a bed with Ike whose come-ons have dwindled over time though he talks often and publicly of our non-existent forever love. Shin keeps to himself.
Most Tuesdays, I fiddle around with a radio that Yee, the downstairs neighbor in apartment 7B, fixed up with hair glue and guitar strings after fishing it out of the East River. In exchange for the radio, I traded Yee a bag of beef jerky, salted fish, and a brief feel of my left breast. The barter could have taken place with less groping, but I was moved by an uncomfortable sympathy. His parents disappeared last year when the earth broke somewhere between Barclay and Rector Street. Yee watched the fault line vacuum them in, and to his grief, not a trace of bone was found the next day. For this peculiar trauma, I popped the top three buttons of my blouse and lowered that heavy mound of flesh into his hand.
With the radio, I started a weekly show about love, which I suppose I have Yee to thank for. When he lifted his palm from my breast, I asked him if he had ever been in love.
“Before or after the Big Suck?” he asked, as that was his name for disaster.
“Both, I guess.”
He paused for a moment before sheepishly replying, “Not before.”
As I waited for him to finish his thoughts, I saw his eyes lower to the floor and knew I made a mistake in asking.
Because Yee never asked me about love in turn, I talk into a black box about various nothings concerning love. Mostly, I talk about Mal.
For my segment on long-distance relationships, I decided to slip on the guise of Mal’s disappearance as a sort of long-distance affair. Ike slid through the wires of the program despite having been permanently banned from the show to offer his two cents: Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true. Why should we ever be apart? Though his advice was plagiarized from Elvis Presley lyrics, he had a good point. That night, I turned on my ELVIS 3000 karaoke machine and let Ike serenade me off-key while I drowned myself in the last of that month’s liquor ration.
Dear listeners, if your lover is in a militarized zone, consider sending a care package via the few accredited private messenger services. Support local business but also be wary of sending contraband. If you must, wrap it in a wool sweater—that way, your lover will have something warm to wear as well.
How the mayoral office now defines “long-distance”: anything beyond two checkpoints. In that sense, Mal and I are long-distance though I have never followed through on my own advice. I called her once, twice, and then twenty times, each time receiving an automated government-generated message explaining away the unreliability of connections in times of emergency. I called friends, left them messages to pass on to her, but everyone, being too preoccupied with their own disasters, eventually disappeared as well.
In a final effort to reach out, I devised coded messages through each broadcast. At the end of each segment, I would play a song, prefacing it with, “And this song goes out to the letter _ _.” I hope she knows these letters are for her to collect, and if she has been collecting them, they would spell out: MIRA MISSES MAL SORRY MAL WHERE R U MAL R U ALIVE MAL IF U R SEND WORD MIRA MISSES MA—
I also began to drink in devastation vicariously.
A caller one day said the following: “My husband has been distant since it happened. Of course, since we live by the East River, which is now 43% radium, our daughter was born with tentacle toes and gills. I think she’s still cute as a bug but I suspect that might have something to do with his emotional unavailability. Do you think we’ll make it?”
I said, “I live by the East River, too. I’m sure my progeny will be part-komodo dragon but I’d love the child all the same. Your husband could be more understanding. Have you tried talking to him?”
There was a pause and then commotion from her line. “Sorry,” the caller said breathlessly. “Husband is listening in the other room and is not happy. I’ll have to call you back another time.”
Click.
While few called in, there was one regular caller who would phone in at the same exact time every Tuesday. The voice on the other end delivered their words slowly and deliberately, and over time it became clear that the voice was not a human voice, but one mediated by machine. Whenever the caller phoned in, I couldn’t help but think of their voice and a tattered memory of the ocean.
“HEL-LO,” the voice said.
“Hello,” I replied. “What’s your name and where are you calling from? What are you interested in sharing today?”
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“I AM SAD.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. Do you care to share why you are sad today?”
A pause. “NOT TO-DAY. ALL DAYS.”
“What makes you sad every day, listener? I think I’ll call you Sad since you didn’t give me a name.”
“NO HEAD.”
“Sad, can you be a little bit more specific? What do you mean by that?”
“NO HEAD.”
Click.
Our conversations usually start and end this way.
Sometimes I think they are flirting with me. Once, out of nowhere, they said, “DON’T GO FAR OFF, NOT EV-EN FOR A DAY,” and that declaration, in their voice like the rip of a wave in far out waters, sounded so sure of it.
As I was about to tell them that I wasn’t going anywhere, they said, “PA-BLO NE-RU-DA.”
Sometimes they joke. “THIS IS ME BREATH-ING,” they said and then stayed silent for three minutes.
“Are you sure you’re human?” I asked after enough time had passed.
“NO COM-MENT.”
Ma, overhearing one of these exchanges, offers, “This is like Sleepless in Seattle, but I want to know what Tom Hanks does for a living first before you meet them.”
With her blessing, I began to collect facts about Sad. They like Pablo Neruda. They miss being able to swim. They were peeling an apple once during a call and sliced their finger. They suffer from depression and possibly some form of social anxiety disorder. They are an insomniac. They like salty things and sweet things. They live somewhere in this building.
Dear listeners, there is a kindness we need to extend to people we love who are far, far away. Nothing will feel as good as being close enough to touch them. I guarantee it. This holiday, give them the gift of touch. Put yourself in an envelope and puncture three holes. When they open you, reach out and let them know how much they have been missed.
I lose Mal a second time in dreams. In one, I am sitting in a bathtub with Mal and a layer of white petals. Holding her like a cello, her body, wide but light in the water, her black curly hair pillows in my mouth. I kiss the back of her neck with its tiny soft hairs. I stroke her wrinkly knees. I tell her I want us to turn into two raisins and fall down the drain. The more I talk, the more apparent her silence becomes, until finally she turns around but I do not see her face. I see her hair cascading over her like a widow’s veil and then with gradual horror and grace, the veil washes over her and she turns into a black eel. She bares her teeth like white bone needles and bites open my inner thighs, pulsing inward with such force that seems to defy the capacity of her new size. Reaching out with my hands, I try to grip her slippery body, only to find it paved with thorns, and it pricks. I hold out my briar patch hands and I look down at the pool of my blood pluming from beneath me—a red violence. The eel disappears entirely, but when I wake up, I can still feel her swimming inside me for days.
Once, Sad left me a message on my machine that echoed: “IN SPAIN… THEY ARE… GROW-ING… AP-PLES… WANT TO GO… SOME TIME?”
When I started the show that day, I laughed into the mic. “This is for my listener, Sad,” I said. “Yes. Let’s.”
At the end of the program, I played a recording of rain falling in a tunnel and offered the letter L.
I willed myself to dream of Sad so that I would stop dreaming of eels and one night it was close to working. In my dream, I was on a tiny sand mound surrounded by a black ocean. Then a flick of silver in the water slowly manifested itself into a merman with hair the same ocean black that appeared to bleed into water. He pushed up with two arms onto the sand mound, walking his hands towards me. He introduced himself as Sad. Gesturing to my mouth, he seemed to be asking, Salt? I thought, Yes, please and he moved his mouth towards my mouth and I could taste the sand in every shell at the bottom of the ocean floor. He moved his hand to part my thighs, paused, and looked down. Beneath me, a black eel was crawling out, bloating with a terrible anger that ripped through my body. I woke up and put hands to belly and sternum to make sure I was still whole, then felt slightly disappointed after confirming that fact.
Yee says, “Guilt.” He rummages through the dumpster behind Building 6D as I stand guard in a rubber poncho. The sky begins to darken and the workers in rubber suits have started to flip their flashlights on and off anxiously.
“What do I have to be guilty of?” I retort.
From the depths of the dumpster, amidst the rustling and clanging, I hear Yee’s echo, “I MISS YOU MAL WHERE ARE YOU MAL.”
“Shut up. Have you been decoding my messages?”
“Yeah,” Yee responds matter-of-factly as he rises up with two handfuls of electrical wire. “Jackpot!”
“You’re taunting me. That’s not nice.”
“I’m just saying,” Yee sighs, “you are simultaneously trying to kill and resuscitate a dead thing. It’s beyond counterproductive—it’s just absurd.”
I look up at Yee who is pocketing his latest finds in a makeshift duffel made up of trash bags, his hair decorated with eggshell confetti and rice. He forgot to bring gloves with him once again.
“You’re right. I’m the absurd one.”
Yee offers an apologetic face and reaches out to pat my shoulder, which I let him do because of the acid-proof rubber I’m wearing. “You think,” he begins, “you might want to come back to my place for a little bit? I fixed up an old Nintendo 64 and picked up this month’s rations—Chef Boyardee or whatever the new government brand is. We can eat or you know, whatever…”
Later that night, I let Yee fumble his way on top of me while lying on his mattress with a volatile spring that juts out completely when he finally comes. I picture Sad with his computerized voice and love of metaphor. I think of him with black hair and prickly chin. When Yee rolls over onto his back, he offers me a cigarette from his father’s pack. As I smoke, I brush the eggshells from Yee’s hair while he cries, thinking, Okay, I can work with this.
On the radio show a week later, I wait for Sad to call.
“HEL-LO,” the voice says. “RAIN A LOT TO-DAY.” Even his small talk feels heavy.
“What did you think of our discussion today, Sad?” That day, I was talking about misfortunes in relationships and how people move past them. One woman called in about her miscarriage and how her husband wouldn’t even look at her the same after that. Another caller wanted to know if it was appropriate to continue her relationship with her boyfriend after he died in the Nova Scotia floods and returned as a ghost.
“IT IS A-BOUT,” he begins, “BE-ING STUCK. WHAT TO DO A-BOUT IT.”
“What do you suggest, Sad? For people who are stuck?”
“SWIM.”
I laugh thinking of how uninhabitable our waters had been these past few years, their rising toxicity level, the fish that washed onto shores, their bones plucked completely clean from flesh.
Click.
In the lobby of the building a couple of days later, after picking up a Spam surplus at the nearest checkpoint, I see a series of new Xeroxed fliers posted across a bulletin board. On them is the word “LOOK” and instinctively, I whip around in a circle, expecting to find someone or something there. Nothing. I peer into the paper and see that several squiggly lines resembling currents accompany the word. Upon closer inspection, I see that the paper has ink bleeding through it. When I flip it around, I see scratched into the paper with a black Sharpie: “1A.”
I look down the hallway of the lobby counting down the apartment doors, which begins at 1G, then 1F, then 1E, and so on, moving away from the building’s front door. 1A is at the far end of this corridor—a red door in a sea of metallic grays, as if it had stood the test of time and won.
I hold onto one of the fliers for days, waiting. Mira, look, Mira, look. In the fat letters of the flier, I see a narrative unfold—a shadow, a pair of rough hands, and an abyss I would fall into for days. Shin, catching me with the flier in one hand and masturbating with the other one night, whispers quietly, Go.
Dear l
isteners, I once met a poet who said that each time someone broke her heart, she would run through a stretch of Coney Island beach at night, climb onto a lifeguard’s chair, and hurl herself down onto a pile of broken glass. I was young when I heard this and thought that this dedication to hurt meant that you ate glass to become stronger. Then the doctor told me one day that my stomach was full of so much glass that it was cutting into my lining. That is why I have this ulcer. That is why I seek out other forms of nutrition, and finding nothing else that tastes as good, I rely on Prilosec. I can’t offer you any more advice beyond this.
The following Tuesday, I wake up to rapt knocking on the apartment door and open it to find a sobbing Lucinda from two floors down. Ma rises from bed, hobbling over to Lucinda with her numbed right calf. Lucinda at that point can only cry over and over, “He’s dead! He’s dead! God took him and he’s dead!”
Grandpa Why turns on the news and there is NY1 with a breaking news story about a windstorm that hit Queens in the west, starting from Flushing and then moving into Corona. The windstorm had knocked down telephone wires, hurled trees onto cars, and smashed into houses. In several of the neighborhoods, the sparks from torn wires caught fire on the dry wood patching up many of the apartment buildings. The fire hopped from building to building until finally it reached an apartment building at the edge of a park that no one frequented anymore. There, the fire died, taking with it 153 people who were all surely, at some point, desperately pawing at the layers of wood plastered over their windows—fire swarming from behind and in front of them—nursing a desperate faith that after diving into the closest flame, they could come out the other side alive.