“For me, any time is a long time. Yesterday till today. Today till tomorrow. Time passes faster for young people.”
“You’re not as old as all that,” I said.
“No. I’m a newly grown fingernail. A dot in history.” He bit off a hangnail on his thumb. He looked like a boy then. “What is it that you do?”
“I make coffee, clean tables. I also launder.” I got up and walked beside him.
“Do you enjoy it?”
“I’m good at latte art,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked, and then coughed into his palm.
“You make little drawings by pouring milk over the espresso. If I’m not rushing, I can make fantasy creatures, like a jackalope. It’s taken me years to perfect—”
He laughed and coughed some more.
“Is that what you care about? You want to draw little hearts and swans on drinks that people will consume in less than ten minutes or put a plastic lid over.” The laughter died in his throat.
“If I don’t focus on the details, I wouldn’t know how to live. Isn’t that what life is about? Just a bunch of trivial moments that you hope will accrue some kind of meaning at the end.” I looked at a squirrel grooming its tail on a low bush. It was so light that the leaves held it up just fine.
“I want to believe that. I do. But people only remember the general, what history can capture, the records. You told me you were from Vietnam?” I was glad he remembered our brief encounter in the hallway the day I moved in. He took out a cigarette and lit it. “Want one?”
I nodded. I didn’t smoke but I wanted to please him. “Vietnam, yeah. Something like that.”
He looked at me curiously. “When you told me where you were from last week, you were overly shy. Like you couldn’t place the country, or you couldn’t place yourself in it. You weren’t sure. You remind me of someone.” He surprised me by grabbing the ends of my hair and held it in a fist. I felt his aggression and tried not to flinch or move away. He let go.
“Who?” I asked.
“People here still think Vietnam is a jungle—brown savages, an exotic Asian whore who you can’t possess, but still satisfies all your sexual demands. It’s burnt into the American imagination. You can’t change that. As soon as you say something different, you make some old vet defensive or guilty or confused. Try telling them some other tales that don’t fit their presumptions. Vietnam—” He dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his shoe. “Is a war, not a country. Anything besides is irrelevant.”
“Where are you from?” I said. I was shaking though not from the cold.
“You’re not listening.”
“I am.”
“It doesn’t matter where I’m from. I’ll always be the gook from Apocalypse Now. And you, your history is irrelevant.”
Though I sensed that he wasn’t trying to be unkind, I still reddened all the same. “I don’t even know your name,” I said.
“My English name is D—, but if you spare me the confusion of hearing it, then I’ll do the same for you.”
If he were my soldier, I should have known, but the sound of his voice wasn’t familiar to me. I associated it with nothing. It was a thing on its own, untethered like the way he saw himself.
“Don’t you look back sometimes?” I asked.
“Sure, I reminisce. Just about every immigrant does. I have these flashes: standing in a wooden boat, pissing in a river. But it’s like stumbling into somebody else’s dream. You can’t even think of boat or river in your mother’s tongue. Everything you remember is shaped in the new language. All of a sudden, it isn’t the same boat anymore and I was never that boy. When you leave the old country at an age not young enough to get adopted into the new and not old enough to know how to reject it, you become this mutant thing: between borders, between languages, between memories.” He pressed his temples. “If you ask me, I think it’s easier to reinvent than to retrace. You’re not the only one, you know. Look at this city and its faces. You’re not the only one with an ungraspable history.”
3
Lilah and I kept in touch. I had given her my number in Montauk and three weeks after our first meeting, she called me. She asked me where I lived. I told her. She said it would take her less than thirty minutes to get there by train. “Are you busy?” she asked. I couldn’t think of any reason not to see her, other than that we didn’t know each other at all except for the one time we’d acted like old friends. Few people could make you feel this way—that when you meet, pieces of the cosmos shifted and aligned so that you can look back at your entire history and see how everything had worked out just so you could be there with them. Even now, I realized she was continuing our assumed friendship, something that went beyond Montauk, reaching further back than the first time we’d met.
She didn’t apologize for contacting me out of the blue or for nothing, the way people do when they get self-conscious. If I were still a young girl, I would have been smitten, but I decided to be more careful. I was afraid of being too naïve, unguarded, and too willing to let passion drive me. She was dark, attractive, and had a masculine dismissal of her own beauty that was comforting.
I waited by the window, anxious and fearful of seeing her. Since coming to New York, I’d gotten used to being alone. There had been others, people I could have loved if such love didn’t demand constant physical intimacy, an act I couldn’t engage in without disassociating myself from my own body. Over time, even the most patient and tender person couldn’t stop feeling like they were terrorizing me. No one wanted a victim they didn’t create.
Since parting with the little girl, I had not made another friend. The very loyalty of friendships, it seemed, was marked by betrayal. Unconsciously, I placed my hand on my shin. I blinked and there it was again—the charcoaled sky. Smoke-filled nostrils. Closed eyes, a weak defense against the rising heat.
I saw Lilah cross the street. For a split second, I thought I shouldn’t come to the door and act as if I wasn’t home, or pretend she’d gotten the wrong address. The air wrapped around her had felt dangerous. It had been a long time since I felt the need to run. Which direction I had yet to decide.
In front of my open door, she took off her wet boots and left them outside. Once I invited her in, she put down her handbag at the nearest table, took off her leather jacket and pulled down her sweater that had risen above her stomach. These offhanded modern-woman manners diffused my worries.
“So this is where you live,” she said.
“Yeah.” I blinked. My anxiety returned, the way it happened when you invited someone home after a first date.
“I brought you something.” She fumbled her hand inside her bag and took out a glass case.
An eye—the iris looked liquid. Pale blue spiraled like eddies. My insides were weeping, exposed to its merciless stare.
“Don’t be so spooked. I’m not wishing you ill or anything. You understand, don’t you?” she said.
“I don’t know if I deserve it.”
“Well, it’s yours. It’s not like anyone else can use it now. I made it with you in mind,” she said. Then suddenly averting her eyes from my gaze, she asked, “What do you think about me having an affair?”
“What?”
“The man you saw in Montauk wasn’t my husband. He asked his assistant to take me because he couldn’t. I’ve wanted to go for a while—”
She sat down on the rug. I was glad she didn’t comment on my lack of furniture.
“And that’s the man you want to have an affair with?” I breathed.
She nodded and played with her toes. “I know I’m so typical. This is what people do. My father did it to my mother. We’re destined to repeat history.”
“His assistant?” I said. “Are you looking to get caught? Because you will.”
“We’ll be careful,” she said cheerfully. Her toes wigg
led.
“Why not try telling your husband how you feel? Tell him what you’re telling me.”
She laughed and spread out on the floor. She studied the ceiling as if she could see the impending disasters. “Have you ever been that honest before? Can you seriously be that honest with someone you love?”
“Are you in love with the assistant?”
“My husband is a man who’s never experienced true pain. It’s sinful to be so naïve.”
I wanted to kiss her then if only to startle her out of her insolence, perhaps save one man from having his trust and selfesteem shattered, and from putting others who might love him afterward through unnecessary tests. The cycle could end here.
“Why are you telling me this?” I mumbled.
“I can’t do it alone.”
“Ever since I saw you, I kept going through a time warp.” There. I was being as honest as I could.
“You’re just what I need right now,” she said. “Someone who’ll drive me through the storm.”
I smiled, realizing I had already done so in Montauk. That was why she came here. I sat down on the frayed rug next to her. “So you’ll have your affair.”
“And you’ll have yours,” she looked at me with a dare in her eyes. “Nobody’s honest, ever. Not if they really know love,” she said.
Over the next few weeks, Lilah would show up at my apartment or meet me during my lunch break at work. She asked for my schedule and I gave it to her without believing she would actually look for me wherever I was during the day. Sometimes when the coffee shop was busy, she would come in and sit in a corner to draw, sketches of different colored eyes with reflections of flying objects at their centers, a bird, falling meteorites, a leaf storm. Other times, she would simply stare fixedly at a point in the air. She didn’t try to talk to me or even make eye contact. She acted like a regular customer who had found their favorite spot to be alone. I never found her overwhelming, though her frequent visits were noticeable. Matt, my co-worker, nudged my elbow one day, “Check out the hot milf. What’s her deal?”
“Leave her alone,” I told him.
“Jeez. You know her? You two lovers or something?” he said.
I ignored him and went to join Lilah.
We talked for hours about her husband’s assistant. She wouldn’t call him by his name, only the assistant. She told me languidly which days of the week they would meet, at which motels or bars with unisex restrooms. She told me about how much he sweated, so different from her husband who never produced a drop even during their most physically intimate moments. I became conscious of the few drops of sweat on the sides of my face. The assistant slathered her with his fluids, both outside and in. He liked to keep her underwear with him so she always brought an extra pair.
“If your wife has an extra pair of panties in her purse, she’s cheating!” She squealed, pulling out a lacy, purple thing and dangled it in front of me. “I think he sells my dirty ones on eBay,” she said. She was full of energy as she talked. Her hands fluttered between us. At times, I thought she was too animated.
“Do you trust this guy?” I said.
“Of course I do.” She shrugged.
“What if he wanted more than just an affair?”
“Oh.” She scoffed and swiped the air with her hand once more. “I don’t think so. He needs that job. Do you want to hear about how he went down on me or not?”
I soon learned my questions were not welcomed. She was there to tell me stories. They also could not be interrupted or sidetracked. I didn’t mind just being in her company, offering little of myself. Visit after visit, I began to sense that something was wrong. Everyone lied when they told a story whether or not they meant to, so I didn’t question the details that felt like exaggerations, like his desperate need to be near her, or how he waited for her in the cold for nearly eight hours. It seemed natural that she wanted to be portrayed as the type of woman you would do that for. If she was lying, I was just as willing to participate in her fiction. That was the condition of friendships, the little girl had taught me.
Lilah was always specific about the seduction, how he pampered her, where they went, what they talked about; she rarely offered facts about him outside of their romance, and when she did they weren’t consistent. Once, she had said he was a Patriots’ fan. Later, she said he hated all sports, anything related to the media. She liked that he wasn’t worldly; he didn’t read the newspapers and didn’t own a TV, unlike her husband Jon who was astute about various topics and could easily contribute to various types of conversation. Once she and the assistant were talking to another couple, the woman was passionately describing how female bodies had been sites for patriarchal abuse and needed to be reclaimed, the assistant had looked into her eyes and yawned. Lilah found it hysterical how he hadn’t pretended to be interested.
“He’s just outside of conventions, you know. He read me a poem he wrote for me. It made no sense at all. It was a combination of words printed on a meat packet and a Shakespeare sonnet. That’s how he feels about me,” she said.
Maybe he was truly brilliant, this assistant, or foolish.
“Has anyone ever done that for you?” she asked suddenly.
“What?”
“Given you something that existed absolutely nowhere else in the world?”
My friendship with Lilah filled my days the way a house might suddenly be submerged in water. I was drawn to her because people are drawn to uncertainty, the abyss. Arms of darkness wrenched you from your ordinary life, which had been a long sleep, and pushed you down deeper into comatose, into dreams. And like people you meet in dreams, she was both real and impossible.
I lay down on the couch in my living room. With a simple shut of the eyelids, I was at the camp again. I saw myself holding the little girl’s hand, I as a woman and she, still a child. I had loved her as though I were a tree and she a branch that grew from my flesh. The first time we played together, she’d told me her name and I’d quickly buried it at the back of my mind. People used names to distinguish among each other, but in the world of the camp, I had only one little girl. Now I said her name out loud, let the syllables hang alone in the air, separated from myself.
I didn’t know where my friendship with Lilah would lead me, but maybe it was enough to want to surrender to it.
It was determined at a young age, the kind of woman that I would let hold me up by a string, the kind of man I would attract because of my fatherless nature, which was less of a fact than a personality trait, the way someone’s whole identity centers around the very thing he lacks.
I’d burned a meadow for her, watched tall and lush sugarcane get scorched to the ground. There was no other reason, except that she had asked me to. The little girl—Lilah. Their likeness was impossible, but absolute. My neighbor—my soldier. Time was folding, stretching into infinity, collapsing into a single moment.
Were people who shared similar physical attributes likely to have similar character traits as well? Were they to have similar narratives, the same self-defining memories? Lilah wasn’t surprised by my quick loyalty, though she wasn’t aware that it’d been tested and retested many times in the past before we ever met. Most people felt the same way about us as we felt about them. I blindly took the role she gave me.
I stopped thinking of her husband, made excuses on Lilah’s behalf, and justified my position as just a witness, not an accomplice. She would commit adultery with or without me. It was even a good thing since he would be spared the burden of change. We were used to endings. Endings were parts of our days; programmed in our tired bodies from the moment we closed our eyes. Change on the other hand was difficult to overcome.
Lilah. My neighbor. Me. All in one place again.
Suddenly, I felt like I could breathe.
4
Lilah and I talked to each other as though we were running and suddenly stopped, out
of breath. We spent every possible minute together, neglecting responsibilities in other areas of our lives. Our chance for happiness was ruined by our eagerness to share too much and too quickly. After meeting her, I could understand why society condemns certain drugs, which artificially induce a state of being that turn the world into a playground for lovers and reduce all rigid structures to ash. Often we were together alone, indoors, since we didn’t need much exterior stimulation. We were absorbed by each other. I had not been to Lilah’s home though she came to mine often. At first we always got along because she liked to talk and I liked to listen to her.
One day, she got angry with me. As usual, she was waiting for me when I got off work. As we walked, she told me about a client who had come in earlier that day for an annual exam. The woman asked Lilah if she should tell her fiancé about her fake eye before the wedding. They’d only just met three months prior, but they were both ready.
“She said it’s one thing to say you’re blind in one eye. It’s another to explain how you got to be that way,” Lilah said. “I advised against telling him. Marriage needs its secrets, don’t you think?”
When we got to my apartment, I carelessly tore open my mail. The heading on one of the letters must have caught her eye.
“What’s that?” she said.
“I think I just got approved to be a surrogate mother,” I said, staring at the paper.
“You what?” She took the letter from me. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. I don’t intend to have children of my own so I figure the only way I could know what birthing is like—” I grinned.
“That’s fucking stupid.”
I was surprised by her hostility. Her reaction was such a stark difference from the receptionist at the clinic.
“I don’t know why you think that but—where are you going?”
She didn’t hear my question. She was already out the door.
I didn’t hear from Lilah for a few days. When she called, she made no mention of our conversation about surrogacy. She asked if I wanted to go spice hunting with her. Lilah had started to enjoy cooking again. She would make a four-course meal for her husband on a Tuesday night. She claimed she didn’t do it out of guilt, but a renewed sense of playfulness. She said she had energy she hadn’t had in years. Suddenly, their relationship was fulfilling again, she told me. But could she stop seeing the assistant? No. I thought people like Lilah were made to inflict pain, the kind you became dependent on because it was larger than you. The closest her husband could come to being great was by being deceived by her, over and over.
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