“No. It’s not.”
We passed the joint back and forth a few more times, then Jon put it out on the rim of a trash can and tossed it. We exchanged a few more words about the sky, the temperature—warm for late November; a one-footed pigeon on the opposite bench, which we both expressed pity for, then Jon stood up.
“Lilah hasn’t been home much lately,” he said.
“I’m sorry—”
“Why, is it your fault?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Thanks for—it was nice.”
I nodded.
“Can we—is it okay if we keep this between us?”
“Sure,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if he meant our chance meeting, us sharing a smoke, or me finding him in the first precious morning hours alone, not a husband or a could-have-been father, just a man feeding wild birds.
7
Another light bulb in the coffee shop broke. It was past eleven at night and I’d finished putting away the chairs. I checked the bathroom walls for chewing gum and pried it off. I’d worked here since I’d dropped out of college a few years ago because it was easy and I could talk to hundreds of people every day and still preserve my solitude. Now I was still in my twenties, but felt that it wouldn’t be long until I was replaced with a fresher face and a less sullen manner. With the money from Lilah and Jon I could finish college. I’d gone to the fertility clinic with a simple desire to make money and to be able to live near my neighbor, yet Lilah’s need had collided with my own. In the corner, my coworker Matt was sweeping.
“Hey, Matt,” I called.
“What?” He looked up. His boyish face contrasted with his deep voice.
“When you realize you have feelings for someone, do you tell them right away or do you wait?”
“It depends,” he said.
“On what? Timing?”
“I think it depends on whether or not you want anything to change.” He shook his head. “I don’t know—people like to confess their feelings, but afterward they’re not ready to face the fact that nothing changes.”
“You alright? Rough talk with the girlfriend last night?” I asked.
“She wants different things. I’m amazed anyone in this world can find love at all. I’ll probably end up alone.” He swept a dust pile into a corner. “Anyway, you’re probably asking for a reason. So who is it?”
“Someone I can’t have,” I said.
“Well there, that’s your answer.”
There was a game I used to play as a girl. One person would ask “what if” and the other would answer. Nobody ever explained the rules of the game. It was the kind of game that was not possible if the participants didn’t automatically know the rules. On my phone, I sent Lilah a message.
What if I were walking down an alley alone with a hundred dollar bill pinned to my chest?
I had taken the long route home though I was tired.
I would think you’re a huge idiot, but would wait to see what happens next.
She understood. I took a decorative pin off the breast of my sweater, pierced a bill through, and pinned it on my outer jacket.
Only have a twenty. I pressed send. In front of me was an elusive orange tabby cat. Repeatedly it waited for me to catch up with it and then ran further ahead. It was looking back at me now from under the bridge.
What if tonight was the last night of humanity and you were walking alone in the dark with money pinned to your chest, and I were drinking water even though I’d rather have vodka?
I would tell you to have as much vodka as you like. I continued to follow the cat. Behind me there was the sound of shoes crunching on dry leaves.
Having one now. All better.
That was how the game worked. In small increments, it changed the state of the world.
Someone’s following me. What if he’s a murderer?
Tell him you’ll give him twenty dollars to kill you.
I smiled. My heart was beating rapidly inside my chest. Under the bridge, the cat lay down on its back and rolled around on the concrete. Part of me wanted to keep walking so that I wouldn’t lose it, but I turned around and faced my shadow. He was a man, small in stature, eyes like a hawk. His lips disappeared into his mouth.
“If you kill me, you can have this.” I pointed to the bill on my jacket.
“What?” He walked up to meet me. “Kill you?”
“You can have it,” I said “If you kill me.”
He squinted his hawk eyes. “How?”
“That’s not for me to figure out.” We both looked at the water.
“I could give you a push over there. It would look like you committed suicide?” he said.
Going to jump off the bridge. With help of course.
Jon is on his way to rescue you.
The man and I walked side by side. We reached the underbelly of the bridge. I didn’t see the cat. We climbed a short flight of stairs up the bridge.
“Why do you want me to kill you?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Why did you think I would accept? There’s something about me, isn’t there? People are always asking this kind of thing from me.”
“Honestly I didn’t think you would accept. I was playing a game with someone. It’s my bad luck that you agreed,” I said.
“A game?”
I nodded. I leaned over the railing and looked down. The water looked like jelly. I believed that I would not die if I fell. I would slowly sink into the jelly.
“What if I really pushed you?” he asked. He seemed to be full of questions.
“It was your idea,” I said. “I would either die or survive.”
I stepped onto the railing. His entire face was scrunched up, only his eyes remained wide and unblinking.
“Damn you. Damn you all,” he said. “I’m not going to do anyone anymore favors. You can wait your turn just like everyone else, alright?” he growled and walked away. The back flap of his jacket fluttered behind him. He seemed to be flying away.
I checked my phone and saw a missed call and a text message from Jon.
Free for a drink?
I gave him the address of a bar nearby.
“There’s no one else, is there?” Jon said and drank from his high ball. “For a while she made me feel like there was another man.”
I shook my head. For a while, I’d believed so too. “You’re the one she chooses. You’re who she wants to have children with.”
The music was loud so we huddled our heads together to talk.
“But it’s really you I’m having children with,” he winked.
I smiled. I understood flirting with me was his way of being kind. Even though I hadn’t told Lilah I would accept, I already felt myself leaning toward Jon. Perhaps it was the alcohol, or perhaps it was standing on that bridge and feeling that it didn’t matter if I fell. “I’m the conduit. If you feel uncomfortable, we can just inject your—”
“What’s the difference?” He leaned in and kissed me. I could taste Lilah on him, or maybe I had been tasting him on her. I opened my mouth to let his tongue reach as far to the back of my throat as he wanted. Then he sat back.
“There’s nothing difficult about it. I love my wife, so I’ll do whatever to make her happy. But why are you doing it?” he said. I thought he didn’t only love Lilah, he also trusted her. Trust was more dangerous.
“Tonight I met a man who others ask impossible things of,” I said, “He’s so used to it that he didn’t blink when I asked him to kill me. I want to be someone too.”
“You’re the type of person who’ll do anything, be anybody.”
“That was true before tonight. Now I want to be the one to give you and Lilah something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Please let me. I’m tired of being just anything.”
We were drunk and ecst
atic. The sky opened up above us and though our sense of a physical reality was distorted, habit helped me guide him and I safely back to my apartment. At my front door, Jon stopped and said, “I’ve been here before. I followed her a few times. I’m not a fool—”
I pulled him inside and locked the door behind us. In my bedroom, a flood of light from the ceiling fixture sobered us a little. Jon covered his mouth. Perhaps like me, he too was shocked by the intense uncertainty of our future.
“Are you sure? I know Lilah said—I feel like the three of us should have discussed it together.” He shivered and looked at my open window. He seemed a different man than the one I met at the market and the one I ate with at the restaurant. He was humbled by the plan Lilah had for him, me, us.
“Close it if you want,” I said.
He closed the window and let down the curtains.
“Come here,” I said and suddenly felt choked up by the spontaneity of my words, the same words Lilah had spoken to me only few weeks ago.
He undressed away from me and kicked his clothes and shoes under my bed, I believed, as an attempt to show me he respected me, he wouldn’t intrude on my space. It had been a while since I was intimate with a man. For the first time, I really looked at him, the plump lips, perhaps too plump for a man, the narrow eyes concealing bluish-grey irises underneath—the color deeper now than when we were at the bar—the straight brows that revealed the balance of his world.
When he came under the covers, he got hard, growing impressively between my thighs. I was glad of Jon, even if our freedom to choose was only an illusion, even if being together now was part of Lilah’s plan. I consoled myself with the thought that the baby would be conceived out of love, even though the loved person was absent.
I took his penis in my hand, fondled his balls. When he entered me, he seemed surprised by my readied wetness. He kissed my mouth, grateful for the emotional truths our bodies contained that we had no control over. I squatted on top of him, went up and down. He let me decide how deeply I wanted him inside me, but grabbed my butt to control the speed. We sped up, slowed down, and sped up again until we were both blanketed by pleasure, until it was too late to define what it was we were to face.
Just when he was about to climax, Jon pulled out. His cum dripped between our legs onto the sheets. I looked at him, surprised.
“This has nothing to do with Lilah,” he said. “Not that time anyway.”
I dropped onto my back and lay down next to him.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“A man and a woman.” He pulled me on top of him and held me there, my nose snug in the cave of his collarbone. We melted into each other as if we’d been there together since the beginning of time.
The second time that night, Jon stayed in me when he came.
Lilah and I. We weren’t little girls anymore.
8
My neighbor said he was going away for a while and asked if I could water his plants while he was gone. If I received anything from St. Ann Hospital. I should open it, scan the letters using my phone, and e-mail them to him. He was waiting to find out if he was a match for his twenty-three year old stepson, who needed a marrow transplant. My neighbor said even though his son was from his ex-wife’s previous marriage and not connected to him by blood, he had taken care of him for eighteen years. If that didn’t make him a father, he didn’t know what would. It was the closest he would come to being one, he said, and then corrected himself—he was one.
“You’ll judge me when I tell you this, but when my boy called and told me he was sick, I was devastated. Of course, I was. But it was like a little spark of happiness too.” He blinked slowly, leaned back on the couch, inhaled from his cigarette and let out smoke that thinned out into strands, whirled around each other on the yellowed ceiling. It looked like a ritual he knew well, a position he’d been at for many years, sitting under this cloud of smoke. “I felt happy he called because he needed me. How shitty is that?”
I looked around his aged apartment, thoroughly soaked with tobacco, the brownish and lumpy wallpaper looked like the skin of its occupant. A cheap, short shelf made out of pinewood and metal sat on the right side of the door and served as both a shoe rack and bookshelf. There were a few books on aircrafts, one on the history of trains in the United States, and one that caught my eye, on hotels. It had none of the sparkles and relaxing blues of typical travel guides. It was a paperback and the spine was well creased. I pulled it out. I always felt entitled to books in other people’s homes.
“Let me show you where the plants are.”
I followed him to his bedroom. As soon as the door opened, a familiar heat and humidity sunk into my skin. I gasped. The whole room had been converted into an indoor green house of tropical plants, dusty pink and yellow hibiscus, red flamingos, white orchids, and a multitude of other plants of various shapes, sizes, and colors. Five heat lamps gave off bright light from different angles. I knelt down and fingered the petals of a hibiscus flower. It was in full bloom.
“Take it,” he said. “It’s a crime nobody ever gets to look at them. I’m all they’ve got and I’m not much company.”
I plucked the flower, put it to my lips, and sipped on its stem. The sweat nectar sat on my tongue like a ghost.
My neighbor zigzagged around the plants like a wise gnome in a garden that went on forever.
“This used to bring me joy,” he said. “When I found out I wasn’t invited to my son’s wedding, I thought that’s it, you know. If I’m not a part of his life, I have nothing here to hold me back. I was always figuring out some new places to go to. Now I’m finally going.”
“It’s so,” I struggled to speak, “real.” I looked up. Several butterflies were feeding on sugar trays that hung on nickel wires from the dome-shaped enclosure. “Are they?” I asked.
“The butterflies? Of course, but don’t tell anyone.”
“Where are you traveling to now?” I said.
“Vietnam, my mother’s country,” he said. “There will be flowers like this. Just outside.”
“That should be nice, right?” I said distractedly. I was on my tippy toes, trying to brush at a butterfly’s wings.
“For a little while. I don’t know. I’ve gotten used to the second-best thing.” He looked around the simulated garden. “This will be my last trip.”
My neighbor handed me a list with what at first seemed like detailed information on each plant. As I read it, I realized the list didn’t tell me how to care for the plants, but was a compilation of their mythical facts and meaning, like the jasmine, which has a fragrance so powerful that it could bridge our world with the spirit world. The garden was so well-orchestrated that it would survive without my interference. I just had to remember to refill the sponge in the sugar trays. I was so absorbed by the bedroom garden that I’d failed to notice there was no bed anywhere.
“Where do you sleep?” I said.
“On the couch.” He winked conspiratorially, as if expecting me to understand everything about him in those three syllables.
I lay down on the ground in the bedroom garden and imagined myself a girl again. Now that he’d shown me his secret, I felt safe to show mine too.
“I’m having a baby,” I said. It was the first time I’d admitted it to myself. Saying it out loud didn’t make it feel more real like I’d hoped. “It won’t be mine. It belongs to someone else.”
My neighbor laughed a kind laugh. “May I?” He showed me his palm.
He sat down next to me. I lifted my shirt so he could feel. It had only been a few weeks since Jon and I slept together so naturally there was no visible change in my belly, yet I imagined that the organs inside my body had already begun to shift shape to accommodate the idea of a child. My neighbor’s rough and creased hand was warm. I relaxed under his touch.
“Everybody makes this mistake. You’re young, so you do
too. But a baby belongs to no one. An adult doesn’t, so why would you expect a child to? Just because you give birth to her doesn’t make her yours. Just because you didn’t doesn’t mean she’s not yours either. It’s not up to us asshole adults to decide, is it?” He was cheerful, exuberant. My news had livened him. Seeing him this way made me laugh too.
“I guess it’s not the worst deal in the world. I’ll be that favorite person. Children always have that one person, don’t they? An aunt, an uncle, a grandfather,” I said.
“Having a child will change you. The question of belonging—I think it’s not who your baby belongs to, but that even before he’s born, you already belong to him,” he said.
I placed my hands on my stomach. I had spent years telling myself I didn’t want a home, but like dealing with all things unobtainable, it was easier to pretend it wasn’t important than admit you couldn’t have it. Now I asked myself, what if the child growing inside me was the home I most needed.
After my neighbor left, I stopped by his apartment often, more frequently than I needed to. I walked from wall to wall and dragged my hand across the surface. Though my neighbor wouldn’t admit it, I believed he was happy. Here, enclosed by four walls, he was contained. My neighbor would visit the world of his mother and of his adopted son, but he would not stay long in either one. Geography wouldn’t fracture him, but the people would because they expected him to be one thing and one thing only. A Vietnamese son. An American father. My neighbor wouldn’t admit he was more himself inside these gray walls and the wooden floor that had memorized the pattern of his footsteps day in and out than anywhere else. Time and aging had given him the peace they hadn’t yet given me.
I sat down on the springy couch, stood up and went to his bedroom. I checked the temperature and humidity. I made sure to inject the sponge with more sugar water so the butterflies had enough to feed on. When it got too hot and humid, I went back to the living room and read the book on hotels. I’d skipped this part in my travel as a child, moving from my before-home to the camp, then as a teenager, leaving Vietnam for the United States. I hadn’t stopped at any in-between lodgings, yet every new place I moved into had felt liminal, impermanent, no matter how long I would find myself there. I had heard of others like me who found home by constantly moving. In trains, cars, airplanes, the rhythms of their heart would start to sync with their surrounding. Between destinations, resistance fell away. Yet traveling didn’t put me at ease. Being nowhere was not a state I could embrace.
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