The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  Beckett claimed that Lakeville was “nearish”—she had just gotten her driver’s license—but it was two hours before we parked and hiked across the property to a hillside where at least a hundred other kids were sprawled. We sat on the grass near a heavyset kid named Cutler, who worked at his parents’ pharmacy in Burring Port and didn’t ignore us when Beckett waved.

  “This guy’s just on his practice lap,” Cutler informed us, gesturing to the hunk of metal disappearing down the roadway at the bottom of the hill.

  “Who is it?” Beckett asked.

  “That’s Frankie. He borrowed a car from his brother. He’s looking pretty quick out there, but we’ve got a bunch more to go.”

  The new summer grass felt soft against my bare legs, tickling my thighs under my denim cutoffs.

  “When is the race?” I asked.

  “Right now. All day.”

  “But there’s just one car out there.”

  “Each driver is being timed,” Cutler explained with a trace of disgust. “Best of five laps. The track people wouldn’t. Ever. Let these idiots out there all at once.”

  I could no longer see Frankie’s car. It had become a sound moving like a thick crayon through the air, tracing a curve behind the grassy hill, where the track’s irregular shape continued past a stand of trees.

  It wasn’t long before I spotted Emerson by the edge of the roadway in flat boots and a racing suit. He was yelling up to the top of an elevated platform, where a man in white coveralls stood surveying the track.

  The buzz of Frankie’s car grew more muffled, then louder as it reappeared around a bend and sped down the long straight in front of us. The man on the platform waved a green flag and Emerson jumped, cheering, as the car went past.

  “All right—here goes Frankie’s first timed lap,” said Cutler.

  I lost sight of the car again almost immediately as the road course curved off to the right.

  Beckett got to her feet, pulling me after her, and we stood on tiptoe in the grass, catching glimpses of paint as the car flashed along the ribbon of track behind us. Then she saw her brother and we moved down the hill, settling on a viewing spot behind the pit area, where we watched a few more drivers take their laps. Eventually, Beckett’s brother waved to us, not specifically to me. (I knew from experience with Garrett that it was a wave that merely tolerated his sister at such proximity, but did not welcome us any closer.) Beckett identified the drivers as they took off their helmets, and the names whirled in my mind with the colored flags and the blunt smell of burnt rubber. On my tongue and lips I tasted a fine black grit. I studied Tom’s lips, now that we were in range. Somewhat thin. It wasn’t clear if they would be nice to kiss after all.

  Then the hillside came alive with shouts as an open-top car rolled onto the track. Sticking out of the driver’s seat was a beefy kid named Horace, who was obsessed with pornography, according to the rumors Beckett enthusiastically repeated to me. His car was low and wide like the others, but with a more exaggerated, curvy shape. Behind each of the front wheels, a bunch of metal octopus legs came together and merged into a fat drainpipe stretching along the side of the car.

  Emerson strolled beside the car, cupping his hands to his mouth. “It’s a pig!”

  Horace’s head jerked around, but it was impossible to read his face inside the helmet. He gripped the wheel and revved the engine.

  Emerson leaned in. “It’s a complete and total pig!”

  The driver tilted his head and called out something inaudible.

  “Carpe diem!” Emerson yelled with a wave.

  “When are you up, anyway?” a girl named Kit asked Emerson when he jumped back from the road. But before he could answer, Horace was off on his practice lap with a screech of rubber. Almost immediately, the chattering on the hillside dropped away.

  “Oh, God.”

  Even a person like me, who knew nothing about racing, could see it was odd the way the car was moving as it gained speed. It was accelerating toward the first turn in the track with the back end sluing from side to side, like a mast cut loose in the wind. The car seemed to be fighting with the driver, or the forces of gravity, or both. Roughly, with a struggle, the beast finally followed the track around the bend.

  The other drivers watched in silence.

  Emerson shook his head. “Where did he get that?”

  “His uncle loaned it to him for the day.”

  “All style and power—no grace,” snorted Kit.

  “So, which one of your cars are you using?” Tom asked.

  Emerson shrugged. “Haven’t decided.”

  “No way! You’re not driving one of your own cars!” said a kid named Alexander, who had the best lap time on the board. “You live on this track. No way is this a fair contest.”

  “Uh, he’s paying for it,” said Tom.

  “Hang on,” Emerson said. He jumped closer to his accuser, an expression of amusement lighting up his face. “What if I drive something I’ve never touched before? You pick.”

  “Sure,” Alexander said. “Except you’ve been in everything here.”

  “No. I haven’t been in Jeff’s Mustang.”

  “Yes! Respect!” A kid with a wiry frame sprang to his feet in front of me and, with a righteous pump of his fist, tossed a set of keys at Emerson’s chest.

  “And this is a massive handicap,” said Emerson, waving the keys at Alexander. “Because, as we’ve seen, Jeff’s car is useless for anything except straightaways.”

  “Hey—”

  “Your cornering was a nightmare, Jeff. You nursed that thing around the track.”

  Then the air filled with an avalanche of sounds announcing Horace’s approach. Emerson erupted with laughter as the car roared by, snaking from side to side past the green flag to begin its first timed lap.

  “Wait,” Emerson yelled, “I haven’t driven THE PIG.”

  He watched soberly as Horace approached the first turn. Again, the car appeared to protest strenuously around the bend.

  “I’m driving that,” Emerson announced, handing Jeff’s keys back. “I’ve never even sat in one.”

  “I’m not sure that’s enough of a handicap for you,” said Alexander.

  They debated it until everyone turned at the sound of Horace heading into his second timed lap, his arms stiff at the wheel and shaking like a jackhammer operator’s.

  “Okay, okay,” conceded Alexander with a look of dismay. “Drive the pig.”

  “No—” said Emerson. “Let’s make it harder. I’m thinking, let’s add some weight.”

  Kit rolled her eyes. “Are you totally high?”

  “Seriously.” He jerked his chin in Alexander’s direction. “I want him to be satisfied. Not too much weight. Someone about my size.”

  “Get my sister. She’ll do it,” said Tom, gesturing to where Beckett and I were standing.

  The group of drivers turned.

  Beckett waved hesitantly. A burst of her baby-powder antiperspirant flooded my nostrils.

  Tom’s face contorted with second thoughts. “Nah.”

  “Oh, thanks!” she yelled.

  “It’s physics! We have to calibrate the weight handicap.”

  “What about her?”

  I looked up to find Alexander’s grease-smeared finger pointing at me.

  Emerson glanced over his shoulder. “If she wants to.”

  Oddly, unintentionally, his four words opened the door to a role I could play. If I wanted to. Something other than studying and sleeping.

  Did I want to? The blood was pumping hard in my chest, as it had on the winter morning when the school bus inched forward in the orchard and I saw—we all saw—the limbs inside the station wagon, against the windows. Some kids being driven to school by their parents?

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Hold on wherever you can and try not to die,” said Beckett.

  “Just feel the glory,” said Tom.

  Glory or death. Either could be waiting for me, or
so I believed with the heightened sense of drama native to adolescence. Was that what had Emerson and his friends piling into these tiny cars—the prospect of some extraordinary sensation? Whatever it was, I’d never felt it. And it came with the very real risk of not surviving the ride. The thrill could not exist without the danger, that much was clear.

  I glanced over to where Emerson stood, the ringleader of the day’s events, an impresario to the crowd gathered there, not keeping himself separate, not sitting on the sidelines as I was. By stepping into the car with him, there was a chance of joining him in victory, and also a chance that our fates would be joined the way that the family’s had been joined with the truck driver’s in the apple orchard. If Emerson were to make the slightest miscalculation, if a tire were to blow . . .

  The others were waiting for an answer.

  “Okay, yeah, I guess.”

  “Someone find her a helmet that fits,” ordered Emerson.

  Kit directed me to a bench, where Tom pulled a piece of cloth like a ski mask over my head to line the helmet. I was enjoying his attention, until Beckett wrecked it.

  “Watch the ponytail,” she protested, defending me from her brother’s hands.

  “I’m not touching it,” he said. “The ponytail’s good. It’ll keep the helmet on tight.”

  I wasn’t sure. The next two drivers took their laps while Beckett and Tom pulled helmets on and off my head, trying to find one that fit. The insides stank like wet dog hair and other people’s nasty sweat, but otherwise I liked being inside the helmet. It wasn’t like being trapped behind glass, but taking the glass along with me. Separate, yet adventuring. The astronaut way.

  They finally found a helmet small enough, and Alexander opened the passenger door for me. Emerson was already behind the wheel. I climbed over the doorframe and dropped lower, lower, into the car, until I was seated inches over the pavement, shoulder to shoulder with him in the tiny cockpit. As Alexander worked to fasten the harness of seat belts, my helmet filled with the smell of gasoline and gluey plastic. Then the door shut and I sensed Alexander moving away from the side of the car.

  My legs tensed.

  Emerson yelled to me over the idling engine: “I’m gonna try to do this in less than five laps. For your sake.”

  I looked for a place to hold on. The interior was stripped out. There was nothing, not even a regular door handle. I rested a hand on top of the little door beside me.

  “Keep your hands inside the car!” he shouted.

  We were never introduced.

  Then my head jerked back, heavy in the helmet, and we were moving forward.

  But also sideways. Like a sideways rocket rocking chair.

  Each push of the gear shift under Emerson’s glove opened a trap door in my belly, where my stomach dropped through.

  It was like the tacking of a boat in rough seas. Wave after wave, the gearshift and the trap door did their work. Roar. Push. Drop. At every right-hand turn my knees slammed into the door panel.

  I let my body fall into one continuous vibration with the car, with Emerson—the same as the vibration in my ears and throat, the same as the landscape shaking past us.

  Was he driving like this the day I saw him crying? I did not feel sadness now, only exhilaration and then queasiness when I caught sight of his racing gloves out of the corner of my eye. I had to look ahead to keep my stomach in place.

  A horizon of green and noise, long streamers of trees. The sky was a great ocean, and then we passed under a bridge and back out into bright blue. On the hill, the blur of kids in T-shirts looked like a mountainside covered in flowers.

  Emerson grunted.

  Roar. Push. Drop.

  The road, the sky, the woods, the sounds, they all merged into a single vibration flowing through me like an electric current.

  We shot along a ribbony stretch of roadway and under the bridge again, then rounded a turn, running past the cheering crowds toward the man on the platform for the second time. The checkered flag in his hand floated up and down, like laundry drying in the wind.

  Emerson slapped the dashboard. The car skidded to a stop, and he jumped out.

  Dizzy, anxious to follow him, I found the crude door-release and lifted myself out. The moment my right foot hit the pavement, something ferocious bit into my leg. It wouldn’t let go. Something with ice-cold jaws.

  “Get her!”

  I danced a few steps to the edge of the track, screaming inside my helmet. My face mask steamed up from my breath and I couldn’t see ahead of me.

  “Over here!”

  A shoulder pressed under my armpit, hustling me over to the pit area. Someone pulled my helmet off.

  Through the little opening in my cloth hood, I saw Emerson kneeling at my feet, his helmet and racing gloves scattered on the pavement. He was examining my right leg.

  I tried to speak, but nothing came out. I searched the faces around me.

  Alexander was lecturing: “Cars have shiny bits of metal all over them. The side exhaust pipe is not just another shiny bit of metal.”

  A rectangular patch of seedless watermelon appeared to have replaced the flesh on the inside of my calf.

  “She’s lucky,” Emerson said, staring at the burned skin. “That could have been much worse.”

  “Are you okay?” asked Tom.

  I smiled at him through the little hood, and he looked at me as if I were insane.

  “Where can we get some ice? We need ice,” Beckett said.

  “No. That’s actually not how to treat this burn,” Emerson said. “It would kill the skin.”

  While they bickered, Tom’s face appeared at the edge of my vision. “There’s usually a standby medic, but we waived everything except the fire engine. That wasn’t negotiable.” He pointed to an emergency crew idling around the truck at the far end of the straight, oblivious to our unfolding drama.

  One of the drivers dragged over a first-aid kit as big as a picnic cooler. I tried to meet Emerson’s eyes.

  “I can treat this right here,” he assured me, speaking directly to my leg. “Or do you want me to send someone out to those guys for an ambulance?”

  “No, please don’t.”

  Already, kids were starting to come down the hill to look.

  “It just stings a little,” I lied.

  “I can get rid of that really quick,” Emerson said.

  He asked the others who were standing around to bring him some water, then he reached for his helmet and propped it under my calf. At first the water pouring over my skin made the same biting sensation as the burn, but after his helmet had been filled up and spilled onto the grass, the pain was tolerable. I hugged my arms to myself, shaking, as he wound a bandage around my calf.

  “I know it was an accident. Except. You got hurt,” he said, training his eyes on the dressing. “Sorry.” He got to his feet. “It might blister. If it does, don’t pop it, because it can get infected.”

  “Did we win?”

  “That’s three inches of leg you won’t have to shave for the rest of your life.”

  He walked off, yelling to Horace to take some laps in an easier car.

  I limped back to the parking lot beside Beckett, a current of adrenaline still charging through me—heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure, all set loose in an ecstatic whir by that uncontrollable hormone of speed. It was impossible to hold on to the sensation, I learned, or to recall it except through that plot of scarred flesh, which I came to cherish as a trophy of the day. As we walked, Beckett confirmed that Emerson and I had beaten Alexander’s time on the first lap. That meant the second time around had been our victory lap, but when I turned back to look, Emerson didn’t appear to be celebrating.

  After he left for NYU that fall, it went around that Mr. Webster had arranged for different cars to be delivered to him during the term breaks. Somebody said he got his after-shave custom-blended in England, even though Garrett insisted that Emerson couldn’t possibly have enough facial hair to shave. Instead o
f Chinky-Chink, Garrett and his friends started calling him Emperor Tang.

  My clear nail polish was hardening under a mechanical dryer when the Emperor limped out of the massage room on Li’s arm. His clutch foot was still swollen from the excess fluid in his body. Undeterred, Zandra had expertly wedged it into one of his unlaced sneakers. He couldn’t drive anymore, and he hated to be driven by car services. After his feet started turning into water balloons, the subway became out of the question. I had no choice now but to hail taxis, an arrangement Emerson accepted on the grounds that a Ford Crown Victoria was not a car he wanted to drive anyway.

  Li helped him get settled next to me by the window, where the nail blowers faced a sculpted tabletop mountain, a miniature Eden ribboned by a recirculating waterfall. The stream of water snaked its way past shoots of live bamboo, splashing down onto a striped brown marble in a shallow pool. I watched the magic marble doing somersaults in the water as Mei’s fists pressed down on my shoulders and neck, struggling to release the muscles. I tried to imagine that the hands on my body cared about me, that love came through them. When Mei finished her work, I turned my neck to crack it, and I saw that Emerson’s biceps had collapsed. What was left of the muscles had slipped down and accumulated in low humps just above the crooks of his elbows—a rearrangement of body tissue that rattled me more than the prospect of taking him for his next blood transfusion.

  “I’m finishing the paperwork on that group of Prairie Houses going to the Modern,” I reminded him in an effort to distract myself from his dislocated anatomy. “I just want to confirm: You know that this group of photos includes the Robie House?”