Inside me was a shell made out of liquid. The shell opened up when I came near. I climbed into it and as soon as I lay down, the liquid raised itself above me like long branches. They went into my belly button and came out my back, into my eyes, my open mouth. They saturated every open crevice, every pore, until I disappeared, until I was just a pool of water.
When he was done, he dressed himself and gave me my underwear. He looked exhausted and old. White stubble sprinkled his cheeks and throat. I didn’t notice before, his ashen skin, his two protruding front teeth, pushing on his bloodless lips, exposing the gum. He was thin, his wrists not much bigger than my own. If my soldier were to fight him, he would die, choking on his own blood. I let myself imagine this for a moment longer. I couldn’t control the smirk on my face.
“Liked it, didn’t you?” he said, smiling. He played with his fingers like an embarrassed schoolboy. “We could do this again if you want. Anytime you want to.”
I didn’t move from the bed. I feared that if I stood up, my organs would slip out of me and fall to the floor. He went to the refrigerator, took out a beer.
“Want one?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. He brought a can of beer over, opened it, and handed it to me.
“Sorry, I don’t have anything better to offer.” He sat down on the bed next to me, chugging his beer. I too, sipped on mine, and then spit it back out into the can. He talked about his job, how much he hated cooking, how he couldn’t eat when he knew what went on in the kitchen. Cockroaches, mice, rotten meat. He talked about his father, who left him at an orphanage and ran away.
“I knew he was leaving me. I chased him for two blocks,” he said. “Then he just turned around and screamed No. Was he saying no to me being his son? Or no because it looked so wrong, almost comical, a boy running after his father? I don’t know.”
He talked till the white sunlight that washed the room glowed a sunset orange.
“You should go before your mom wonders where you are,” he said.
It was dry between my legs. I inched myself closer to the edge of the bed and stood up. Nothing came out of me. I pulled my dress off the fan and put it on. He walked me to the door, his hand at the back of my neck.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone what you did,” he said and gave me a light push out the door.
12
When am I going to America?” I asked Mother. It had been a while since she showed me the photograph of her secretary.
She was sitting on the bed and typing on her laptop. She looked at me as if surprised.
“I didn’t know you were so excited to leave,” she said and turned her eyes back to the screen.
I stood in the corner of our bedroom trying to find the right words that wouldn’t upset her.
“It took time to get your paperwork in order. I just—I wanted to keep you a little longer,” she said. “Come here.”
I hesitated. Ever since that day with the little girl’s father, I had been afraid if I were too close to Mother, she would discover it. She would sense my shame or smell something different on me. I didn’t know what she would do if she found out. I thought of the gun under her bed.
“Look at you, you’re too grown up to come to me.” Like usual, her voice was edged with derision, but this time she also looked hurt. “It’ll be a surprise. I know how you like surprises.”
My mother was full of half-truths. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be long, otherwise she wouldn’t have said anything about it at all, yet she refused to give me the exact date. Withholding information was to her a great pleasure.
Just then I heard someone banging on the front door. I went out to the balcony and looked down. As soon as I saw the shoes and cropped boyish hair I knew so well, I ran into the bathroom and shut the door. I could not explain to myself why I didn’t want to see the little girl. I sat in the bathtub and allowed my mind to go back to that day at her apartment. It was only a memory now—I could pretend it didn’t happen.
Mother didn’t move from her bed or ask who it was at the door. She must have seen me out on the balcony and decided I was responsible for the company. For the four years we’d lived at the camp, she had not once asked me about the little girl. She acted as though she didn’t see her.
The banging didn’t stop. I cupped my hands over my ears and lay flat inside the tub. In my mind, I replayed the moment when I opened the door and saw her father. Small details began to smudge. There were teacups on the table where there were none before. The fan was in the living room instead of the bedroom. The little girl’s father was clothed, reading newspapers with legs spread apart. I could see inside his shorts. When I came in, he stood up and asked if I were thirsty.
I fell asleep in the bathtub and woke up to Mother’s shadow stretching across my body onto the bathroom’s wall. I turned toward the wall to avoid looking at her. Thick strands of black hair were stuck on the ceramic tiles; I twirled the hair around my finger.
“Do you know what time it is? Get up,” she said.
I didn’t answer her, curling into a ball with my knees to my chin.
“Get up,” she repeated and stuck her hand under my forearm to undo me. Though I could feel myself shrinking beneath her shadow, I refused to budge. I wasn’t afraid to be yelled at. I didn’t care if she hit me. It was the first time I was deliberately defiant toward my mother. This realization made me laugh so hard that I started to hiccup, saliva trickling out the corners of my mouth. This incensed her. She went to the sink, filled a cup with water, and poured it on the side of my head. As she did everything, she cussed me, herself, our life. Once the cup was empty, she put it down on the rim of the bathtub.
“Stay here all night if you want,” she said, turned off the bathroom’s light, and left.
I lay motionless in the dark. I was worried that any movement would betray my desire to get out of the tub and obliterated the courage I’d gained. My hair, neck, and shoulders were soaked, but my throat dry. I chewed the knuckles on my fingers and let myself go back inside the little girl’s apartment once more. This time, her father didn’t acknowledge me when I came in the door. He was asleep on the couch. I took out a razor and stood there waiting until he opened his eyes so he could watch me as I sliced open his stomach. I was still watching his pupils moving from side to side under his eyelids when my soldier came in the bathroom. The warmth of his hand underneath my neck sent a shock through my body. I hadn’t realized my teeth were chattering till then. My body slackened, having no urge to resist him and no desire to be anywhere else. He lifted me from the tub and set me down in a sitting position on the damp floor. He wrapped a towel around me and sat down next to me. His own clothes were wet.
“Your mother—”he started to say and then stopped himself as though he could read my mind and knew it wouldn’t help me to hear what else Mother had to say. “I can hear the thunder in here. Can you hear it?”
I nodded.
“This is the worst season for soldiers. We still have to practice, still do everything in the pouring rain,” he said.
“Did you skip practice to come here?” I asked. I wished we were closer. I wanted to crawl inside my soldier’s skin and sleep there.
He shook his head, “I just left early. It’s almost eight anyway. Would you like dinner? You must be hungry.”
The mention of food made my stomach rumble, but I didn’t want to go outside just yet. I inched closer to my soldier, grabbing the hem of his corduroy jacket.
“Here.” He handed me a dense, rectangular block, wrapped in silver. “This will keep you full for days.”
The block tasted like a mixture of green beans, soy, and coffee. It was sweet and salty. My teeth ached, trying to bite into it. “Yum,” I forced myself to say.
He chuckled, “Soldiers eat these during war time. Imagine being in underground tunnels, listening to the sounds of machine guns firing off, th
e earth rumbling, and you have been crawling for kilometers—it’s very dark underground—just like here. Anything would taste good!”
I finished eating and lay down on his lap. He jerked as though surprised, and then started petting my head, running his fingers though my hair. As I dozed, I heard him say, “Why did you grow up? Why couldn’t you stay a child forever.”
The next day, the door banging resumed. Like a ghost, the little girl refused to be ignored. I waited for the noise to cease before running downstairs. There was a folded note wedged through the crack under the door. I had been giving her lessons on reading and writing. Still she was more comfortable drawing. The sketch was of two girls, one shorthaired, one longhaired, lying side by side with eyes closed, sharing the same thought bubble. Inside the bubble was an airplane on fire, the only thing colored on the paper. Underneath the picture she’d scribbled Sorry the way a blind man might have. Was she apologizing for hijacking my dreams again? She’d always been able to enter my thoughts no matter whether I was awake or sleeping. Perhaps that was how she might have found out I was leaving her, something she’d always told me would happen, and the picture was a warning. Or instead it showed her wish for the plane to crash and for me to never make it to America. I taped the note in my diary where hundreds of her other drawings were. I wrote on the margin of the page, I don’t need you anymore.
I went out. My hair was caked on one side of my head from sweat and from me chewing on it. I hadn’t showered in a few days. A new line was creased on my forehead from frequent frowning. I decided to walk to the pond.
The sun was setting and I expected to be alone. Soldiers were getting ready to go into the common dining area and the higher-ranked officers were with their family.
Two black shadows, one short and the other long, broke the stillness of the land surrounding the pond. Tiny rain drops pricked the surface, forming hundreds of prisms. Paper boats in yellow, green, blue, purple bobbed on the small ripples toward the darker, cooler half of the pond. I walked toward the sound of happy conversation, feeling lonelier than ever.
“I found your friend outside your place. Where were you?” The sound of my soldier’s voice rang in my ears. I didn’t like seeing him and the little girl together. I’d always thought of them as belonging only to me.
“Sleeping,” I said.
The little girl handed me a silver piece of craft paper. “Saved it for you,” she said.
“This one is a skilled origamist,” my soldier smiled at the little girl.
“You made most of them,” she said.
“I helped a little. In my days, we didn’t have craft papers. We used banana leaves.” My soldier put a paper frog on the pond. In the periphery of my vision, it seemed to hop away and disappear.
“Let’s make a mosquito,” the little girl said. “What can you make?” She looked at me. I shook my head.
“A pond mosquito? I don’t think you need to make a paper one. There are plenty of real ones around here,” my soldier said. “How about a square box. I can do that.” He picked up a brown piece of paper by his feet and began folding.
They went on talking as though I weren’t there, my soldier asking her questions the way he often did me. He always had the ability to make you feel as though nothing stood between you and him, not even air. The little girl was smiling in a way I’d never seen, blushing so that her dark skin looked inflamed.
“Done,” my soldier announced. “What do you think?” It was an incredible thing, a box so small he could barely hold it between two fingers. Immediately I wanted to tear it open, to see what it held though I knew better. “Well I have to go now. I’ll let you girls be.”
Right after my soldier was gone, I started to walk away too. I didn’t want to talk to her. My soldier already seemed to like her more than me though he’d never met her before today. The little girl followed behind without speaking. She knew I was angry.
“Stop following me,” I said.
“What should I do?” she said.
“Do whatever.”
“Do you want to go to the underground jail?” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s stupid. We don’t even fit anymore,” I said.
“We fit one at a time. We always have fun there. You can be guard this time and I’ll be prisoner,” she ran up and walked next to me. Her hair was clean and bouncy, her lips red as if pinched. It was like we’d switched places, me grimy and her glistening. An idea came to me.
“Fine. Let’s go,” I said.
We didn’t hurry our steps though it started to rain harder. The warm water washed away the dirt in my hair, on my face. Streaks of brown ran down my neck. The little girl looked happy. I wondered what reason she had to be so cheerful. We were children of a military camp, we were always going to be. No matter how many places I went to later and how far away, the camp would stay with me. I felt like screaming at her, punching her until she lost the will to play, to invent games for us. That energy was smoldering, stronger than anything I’d ever felt—to shatter the fantasy we’d built together and destroy us both.
A small stream had tunneled its way into the cell. I bent down to look at the floating carcasses of insects, broken pieces of worms, a rat bloated from drowning. I pulled the metal door open.
“Coming?”
The little girl stood a few feet away. There were bags under her eyes, her cheekbones were high, and her lips though thin were sensual. Somehow I didn’t notice she’d grown up too. The day we first found the cell four years ago, it’d been raining just like this. That day I saw her ribcage, which looked like toothpicks stacked on top of each other. Her clothes were soaked now just as before, but her ribs were no longer visible. Instead I saw the curves on her body, the nascence of beautiful breasts.
“Can we maybe wait till it stops raining?” she said.
“You’re the one who insisted we come here. Get in.”
“But—”
I stood up and pretended to walk away.
“Wait.” She came toward the opening, sat down with her feet toward the cell and scooted inside. Seeing her half submerged in the filthy drain water made me nauseous. I closed the metal gate, grabbed a tree branch nearby and put it across the space where the bar used to go. She turned around and lay on her stomach. She pushed on the gate.
“Please let me out,” she cried. Our game had begun.
“You committed a horrible crime. Do you know what you did?” I said. There was a sharp, persistent clanging in my ears. I felt as though I could hear the sound of prisoners kicking their feet, dragging their shackles on the concrete.
“I didn’t do anything. I swear I’m innocent. Please let me out.” She shook the metal bars vigorously. Above us, the sky thundered.
“Why did you let your father do those things to you?” I spoke through the small opening.
“What?”
“Why?” I yelled. I took another branch and hit the metal bars where her fingers were wrapped. She yelped and pulled her hands back.
“My fingers—I think you broke them,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning downward.
“Why?” I repeated, unable to control the smirk on my face. I hesitated for a second, told myself that she was lying. I used the branch to hit the metal bars again. She flinched and turned her head sideway.
“I don’t know.” Were those real tears or game tears? I couldn’t tell.
“You wanted him to, didn’t you? You seduced him,” I said.
“I don’t know. Just let me go—”
“Why didn’t you tell him to stop? Why didn’t you!” I screamed and screamed at her. I told myself I was getting deeper into my role. Then suddenly I saw her, my only friend, my other half, eyes shot red, mouth full of rotten leaves, sunk to her neck in trash and dead animals.
I removed the branch from the
lock. “I’m sorry,” I barely found enough strength to speak. She crawled out of the cell.
“Look, the fireflies are out,” she said as though she hadn’t been hurt, as though this was just like any other game. The only sign of her pain was her cupping her one hand in the other. “Let’s play something else.” She wiped the debris from her face.
“I fucked him too. I don’t need you anymore. We’re the same now,” I said.
She looked at me, grief-stricken. “Do you want to hear a story?” She took my hand. I nodded.
“A long time ago, in the desert of infinite mirrors and shadows,” she began, “a pair of twin sisters were on their way to deliver two flames, the purple one for forgetting, and the green one for remembering . . . ”
We climbed up the trench as she told the story and walked away from the dark water toward the fluttering lights of fireflies.
A few days later, I saw the little girl with a cast for her right hand. I wanted her to be angry, to trick me into a game in which she could exact revenge, but she seemed to know that not flaunting her broken fingers made me even more ashamed. I followed her around the camp, thinking of ways to make it up to her.
“Do you want candy? I know one of the chefs hides chocolate inside his pillow. I could steal it,” I said. I thought of the man who had helped me catch the fish. All I would have to do was ask.
“No, thanks.”
“Do you want to get out of here? Let me distract the guards and you can slip under the gate.”
She shook her head. “It’s not any better out there than it is in here.”
“Should we hunt for rabbits?” I asked. I wanted her to know I would break any rule for her.
She looked at me as though she pitied me, then she raised her cast to say that she couldn’t catch anything with just one hand.
If I Had Two Lives Page 9