by K-Ming Chang
In the morning, we took a taxi to the brim of the city, where my father and his two cousins managed the slot-machine factory. Clouds mopping up the sky’s spilled light. We drove down a half-paved street with apartment buildings so tall I thought they’d been built from the sky down. My father was the rain that day. We watched from the taxi as my mother entered each apartment building on the street, repeating my father’s name until someone told us he had left. The slot-machine manufacturer had halted production months ago, and most of the workers had been deported from the city at night, carrying nothing but their teeth. They guessed my father had gone home to the city where he was born, a city west of every named body of water.
We took the overnight train to Anhui. My brother and I wanted to go home, our boogers black after two hours of walking outside and breathing. We asked why the boys who begged outside the hotels all had the same parts of their bodies missing: a left hand or both feet or tongues. I mistook this for kinship, believing that somehow all the boys without feet found one another by holding up their hurts and pairing their pains. But my mother told me it was because gangs would buy children and injure them the same way, assembling them in teams to go out and earn pity with their new bodies. They knocked on the windows of taxis until the drivers cursed them away.
My mother gave them nothing. She shut the door on one of the boys’ fingers, his hand purpling in the hinge. His fingernail fell off and landed in her lap and my mother flicked it away. I plucked it from the seat crack and tossed it out the window like a coin I could wish with. My mother slapped my hand and said not to touch those boys’ fingernails because they were dirty and we didn’t know what they’d been touching. I reminded her that she touched feet for a living; toenails were her terrain. She gripped my pinky and yanked the nail clean off its bed of skin, so fast I didn’t bleed, the pain a bright bead, rolling back and forth on my tongue until I couldn’t taste anything else. Don’t compare us to them, she said. When another of the boys wedged his wrist through the window slit and offered his palm, my mother spat in it.
* * *
_
We found my father in a top-floor apartment, where my mother knocked on the door so long her knuckles split one by one. He answered. It was blue-hot in the apartment, and my father was bare-legged: I’d never before seen his kneecaps, the hair on his thighs.
When he saw my mother, he stepped back. In his right hand, an apple lit up without its skin. My mother gripped our shoulders, herding our bodies in front of hers, shifting us into the light that swung from the ceiling bulb. This was why she’d brought us along: to say Look what you’ve left me with.
My father ate his apple, saying he’d get a new job soon. Said, The mainland’s where the gods are still giving. America has retired on us. My mother said he was cursed: Every country was another one he couldn’t afford. She told him to come home. He told us we shouldn’t have come. The apple brightened his teeth. Sweat sequined his upper lip. He told my mother to come into the bedroom and locked her in it, then took turns whipping my brother and me as we balled on the sofa. He used a spoon, the cord of a lamp, his sweat-stiffened shirt. It was as much my mother’s punishment as it was ours. My brother’s head knocked against mine as we rolled toward and away from each other. His skull sounded hollow, mine full of water. To distract myself, I churned my tongue in my mouth, tasting my blood in real time.
My mother, locked in the bedroom, begged to be let out. Said, We thought you were dead. We thought you were dead. You were dead. My mother always said that speaking a prayer out loud would keep it from coming true, that a voice cancels out its listener. By speaking his death, she was keeping him alive. When my father finished, he cried into my neck. His apple, half-eaten, was a bright pulp on the floor. He always said that it hurt him to hurt us, that each of our bruises cast a body-sized shadow behind him. My brother threw up over the rail of the balcony, a comet in his belly. The blood in the vomit was bright as confetti.
* * *
_
On the rooftop of my father’s building, you could see an amusement park with an imitation Great Wall. It was spine-shaped. My brother paced one side while my father sat me on his lap, saying this was the perfect place to fly a kite. He showed me the railing that had retired to rust, a place where I could tie several kite-strings at once. He asked me to stay with him. I could live with him while my mother and brother went home, back to the country where I was without a name. He told me he was learning to cook, showed me the scars on his forearms where he’d tossed oil out of the pan and onto himself. When I didn’t speak, he showed me the edge of the roof and tested me, pointing at faraway things and asking for their names in Mandarin: Sky. Cloud. Bird. Car. Crosswalk. Airplane. Night. Child. Then he pointed at himself. Man, I said. He cinched his fist around my wrist, and I felt the bones rub like flint, starting a fire under my skin. No, he said. Father.
He made me repeat it until night. When we returned to his apartment, my father unlocked my mother from the bedroom and tucked us in with her, arranging us on the bed that smelled of him, tugging the sheet over our heads as if shrouding us. I pretended the sheets were made of water and we were treading the bed together, that we were somewhere where sound was a stone, swallowed and sunk.
Back when he was a boy in Texas, my father taught himself to swim in a public pool where white kids thickened the deep end and played Marco Polo, their swim trunks in primary colors, their striped and patterned towels laid out like the flags of foreign countries. My father began in the shallowest end, where even babies could float without their parents. Even on his back, the water folded over him like a sheet, dragged him deep. He gave up on floating, decided he would learn to swim with his belly skimming the pool floor, like those bottom-feeding fish that lived on their sides. My father trained himself to hold his breath in the bath at home, filling a vegetable tub in the kitchen tap and then mixing it with the shower’s rationed hot water. He planted his head in the water, felt it finger his mouth open. The first time, he swallowed half the water and spat out the rest. He practiced until his throat and nostrils hinged shut. The next time he went to the pool, he could sit at the bottom of the pool for hours at a time, pretending he was one of those monks that sat under a waterfall, unlearning pain. The next time, he swam.
He snaked along the floor into the deep end, weaving between legs with his eyes shut. He slithered between calves, nose-bumped someone’s ankle. Up on the surface, someone said, My god, there’s something down here, and the pool was evacuated by the lifeguard, who mistook my father’s submerged body for some kind of escaped reptile.
Years ago in California, my father taught us to swim this way: He plugged the sink with a cucumber, filled it to the brim, pushed both our heads in. I heard my brother exhale underwater, his lungs orphaning their air, my tongue swelling into a mouth-plug. When we struggled, he pushed our heads in deeper, one hand holding my brother’s wrists behind his back, his weaker hand holding mine. My brother buckled first, dropped to his knees, water ribboning out of his lungs. I buried my breath deeper in my belly. When I finally came up, my wrists were free. My father stood behind me, my brother kneeling beside him, wet from the neck up. I kneeled beside my brother. Longer next time, my father said. The longer you can hold it, the farther you’ll go. He twisted a kitchen towel into a rope, wet it in the sink, whipped us until it was dry.
* * *
_
The night bruised its kneecap moon. My brother woke up and saw a white kite leaning on the wall beside the bed. My father had left it there for me, so that I’d wake and see it before light: the kite he’d packed and brought all the way from California. Maybe he thought it would remind me of when we flew together, or maybe he thought I’d mistake the wingspan of white paper for a ghost and leave sooner. When my brother saw the kite there, he tore it apart. He snapped the frame made of disposable chopsticks. Stop, please stop, I said, and ran forward to save what I could, which was nothing
. I crouched on the carpeted floor and brushed the kite-confetti into a neat pile at my knees. Above me, my brother’s breath was backfiring, unable to leave his lungs.
I asked my brother why, looking up at his shadow-battered face. My brother didn’t answer. He just said, Why did he bring that here? I wanted to tell him, Because he missed me and not you. Because he knows that I can fly, too. But instead, I bent and plucked paper from between the floorboards. I didn’t want my father to find the pieces and think it was me.
Go back to bed, I said, but my brother just looked at me. The apartment was still black, but the sky outside was beginning to dull into a dime-colored day.
Our father now stood in the bedroom doorway. He was relaxed, his hands loose at his sides, and I wanted to tell him we could go to the roof. We could saddle the sky with our kites. His eyes focused on the wall behind us. The bald spot where the kite had been. My father looked at me first, then at my brother. My brother, trembling now, backed into his own shadow. I spoke to wedge my words between them: I broke the kite. It was me. I reached into my pockets and made a fist around the pieces, brought them out into the light. The paper scattered from my hands, snowing between my fingers.
I told my father I tore the kite up, that I was still upset that he wasn’t coming home and couldn’t bear to see anything his hands had made. My mother woke, stirring the sheets on the bed. She saw all three of us in the far corner of the room, my father putting his hands on my brother’s shoulders, telling him to kneel. Pick it up, he said, pointing to the pieces.
My brother bent his knees halfway but stopped. I could see him straining to be straight. He said no. My mother got up from the bed, palms up as if she were coming to pet us. Her mouth pleated quiet. I kept saying I did it, I did it, it was me, but my father didn’t look at me.
My brother dropped his knees to the ground. I heard their bones. My brother’s upper lip was wet; what I thought was his shadow was sweat. My brother bent his head to the floor like in prayer as the room was delivered into daylight. He pressed his tongue to a petal of paper on the ground. I imagined it dissolving like a wafer, but it stayed there, pinned and wet. My brother lifted his head. Stood up and spat. We heard it land: a glob of spit hitting my father’s cheek. My mother reached up to touch her own face.
My father fisted my brother’s blue shirt and tried to lift him. But my brother jerked away. He was always bird-boned, so light inside my father’s hands, planning flight. He ran for the door, through the hallway, then up the stairs to the roof. I’d later ask why he ran up instead of down, but he told me nothing.
It was dark in the stairway, like turning the night back on, but we all followed after him. We scattered on the square rooftop, big as a parking lot, where wet lines of laundry hung heavy and dank as meat. Someone had burned something recently and the air was full of gossiping smoke. There was a chicken coop in the center of the roof, made of plywood and plastic wrap, and the two hens inside looked dead. My brother was standing at the edge, where the rooftop ended. Where the railing buckled its shadow around his waist.
I was the one who got the closest. My thumb snagged the belt loop at the back of my brother’s jeans, but he had already climbed over the railing, the rust sloughing off on his hands. I came close enough to see that. He didn’t jump so much as sprint past the sky. He didn’t fall through the air so much as become it. Then my father was behind me, lifting me by my hair, saying Come back from there, come back. I didn’t know if he was talking to my brother or me. My mother had not moved since we got to the roof. She was a statue of salt, solidified by my eyes, but I saw she was speaking something, willing his wings.
The building was at least a hundred stories, and when we first saw it from the window of the taxi, my brother said, It’s like a big boner. A big boner in the sky. I told him to shut up, it was not, it was beautiful, with rows and rows of windows opening like eyes. Wouldn’t you want to live somewhere like that, I asked him. The whole world in your window. My brother said, No, I’ll never live where he lives.
Now the building was not tall enough. I needed it to never end, for the ground to be as far back as history. My mother, the one who watched, would tell the story better: She would say my father loved kites so much he became one, that my brother borrowed new bones. We both watched my father follow my brother as if tethered, yanked along, tied ankle-to-ankle by a kite-string. I grabbed at his ankle, but the weight of his want was too much for me.
When my brother was halfway down and my father a breath above him, their bodies began to rise. They plateaued in the air, horizontal like kites, and flapped in the wind before riding it upward and out, blade-arcing through the air. My brother breached a cloud, rising up past the roof where my mother and I stood, our hands on the railing, our mouths round as sirens.
My father snagged a different wind and flailed in place, hovering halfway between the roof and the street. Then he banked left, looping once around the building and rising. The smog smudged his body out of the sky, and for a second my mother and I forgot they were men. We watched them, two kites riding the air. My mother watched kite-fighting when she was little, the way the strings were coated in powdered glass so that they could cut each other. The losing kites were severed from their tethers, returning to the earth as ash.
My father and brother carried the sky on their backs. They tilted toward each other, circling, and from the ground it might have looked like they were fighting or dancing. Kite-strings unraveled from their underbellies, descending like strands of spun silk. The strings dangled in the air, clear as braids of rain. My mother and I held out our hands and grasped them by the leash, angling our wrists to rhyme them with the wind, coaxing them toward the pecked-out sun, steering them where we couldn’t follow.
* * *
_
My brother landed first. We waited on the roof for hours, our necks gone soft from watching the sky. It was midday when he came down. He hovered above the roof, and then the wind handed him down to us. He landed hard on his belly and scraped his chin. The scabs would later look like the shadow of a beard.
We watched my father glide in and out of sight, his limbs spread as he starfished in the sky. We didn’t wait for him to come down. We left him in midair, retreating from the roof, my brother’s chin bleeding into his palm. My mother stepped onto the street and flagged a taxi. Through the window, I watched the sky. The building wagged like a finger. I tried to see if my father was still somewhere in the sky above it, but all the bodies I counted were birds.
* * *
_
When my father finally came back to California, it wasn’t on wings. It was through the window. He’d lost his key somewhere over the Pacific, and none of us heard his fist frightening the door off its hinges. It was almost day when he decided to break the only street-facing window, glass fluttering down in gowns. He left his shoes on the lawn and he swung through the window, landing on the carpet inside. The shards shucked the skin off his feet. He went to our room first, the bedroom walls furring with so many flies I always woke with my mouth full of their eggs. My brother wet our mattress nightly, dreaming he was a gardener hosing down a field of flowers thorned with tongues, all of them licking his penis till it bled.
When my mother heard a man in our room, she swiped the vase off her bedside table and ran to us. Boxed into the doorway of our bedroom, with her bathrobe fanned open like pale wings, she was more of a moth than our mother. He turned to her. She threw the vase at him and it shattered on the far wall, glass salting the carpet. Later, she claimed she hadn’t seen his face. She thought he was a predator come to skin us in our sleep. When the vase missed him, it struck her own shadow off the wall. We waited to clean the glass in the daylight, all of us on our knees, weeding for glass. I plucked up a piece and my thumb cut open, dripping an ellipses of blood on the carpet that didn’t end for days, not even when my mother slathered mud on it and sucked it bloodless and knotted a str
ing at the base of my thumb.
Our father hierarchized the house: his dishes in the sink stacked on top of ours, his slippers lined up closest to the door, his place at the table facing the window, ours facing the walls. In my sleep, I sucked my thumbs to the bone, and now my father glazed them in gingerroot to sting my mouth awake. If it hurts, it’s helping, he said. The pool hall where he once played every Saturday was now a park with platter-sized ponds and overfed ducks building their nests in water fountains. Whenever we went, he told me not to touch the ducks. The mother will smell that the child’s been touched by another animal, and then she won’t want to feed it anymore. When I asked why, he said that touch is territory. A hand is owned by what it holds. A hand is a whole country. Before bed, I touched my armpit, my ass-crack, my peanut-toes, my tail. The belly button that was pecked into my skin by a bird. I touched them all twice. Named each part of me a citizen of the night.