by K-Ming Chang
The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum. The car has a dent in the passenger door that looks human-shaped. Jie spends a whole minute petting the wheel like she’s taming it. Ma is shotgun. Ba and I sit in the backseat, windows down, suitcases trunked, a Spanish song on the radio that we all somehow know the chorus to.
Jie and I bring jam jars to pee in. Ba fills them all, and we stop once a day to leave the jars by the side of the road like lanterns. Our piss is a gradient, darkening from clear to amber as we run out of water. At night, we pull over and sleep with the seats reclined, one back window open, headlights on in case of nocturnal animals. In case Ba wanders off, we paint his name with engine grease on the back of his windbreaker, along with these words written by Jie: DO NOT APPROACH. To keep him from sleepwalking, we knot three seatbelts around his limbs at night.
Ba’s breath humidifies the whole car, and in the morning we wake with our windows steamed, our bodies hammocked in heat. Jie drives in a spine shape, swerving between lanes, uncontained. We pass Texas and unzip its border with New Mexico, which looks like the same state but thirstier, the cacti more nipplelike, asking for our mouths around them. The desert floor breeds rows of button cacti, and I’m tempted to wander out one night and undress them of their spines. Jie leans her head while she drives, half of her face frying against the window, the left half browning more than the right. I tell her she looks like two women splitting one mouth. Go deep-throat a cactus, she says. Go back to sleep. I dream it: my throat perforated with needle-holes, my throat turning into a sprinkler every time I try to drink.
Jie and I buy corn dogs and packaged pies at convenience stores, where the clerks look at us like we’re a species of upright armadillo, yellow and armored. They watch through the window as Jie pumps gas, sometimes asking where we’re going, sometimes asking where we’re from. We say Taiwan even though we’ve never called it that, and the cashier grins big as a window: We see his missing teeth, we smell what he eats. He says he bombed Taiwan back during the war. Says it looked pretty from the air, a severed green finger floating in the sea. Jie tells him that Taiwan’s silhouette looks more like a finger flipping you off, then runs out of the store with a stolen lighter up her sleeve. The packaged fruit pies dye our spit different colors, and when Ba sleeps at night with his mouth ajar, I can see his tongue glowing blue-raspberry.
We stop at a seafood restaurant somewhere left of Texas, though the closest sea is the one we dream. There’s a live fish tank two feet from our table, and when the waiter hears us speak his dialect he bags us a fish for the road even though we’ve got no fire to cook it. Finally, we fry it on the hood of our car, the sun seething through flesh. The fish tastes metallic, too much memory of the sea in its bones.
On our maps, we pencil the line from Arkansas to LA: It’s straight all the way across, no excuse to get lost. Still, we get lost. In Arizona, we drive in circles around the same three cities until Ma lets us stop at a motel to ask directions. The heat mirages our morning: the sun a severed head, the sky bleeding out from it. By the time we park at another motel, we’ve hallucinated a vulture plucking at a baby’s rib cage (Ma), a Tayal spear wearing a pink wig (Jie), a military of small men dressed in furry purple vests (Ba), and a shark with toddler legs (me). At the motel, we fall asleep side by side by side by side on the queen bed with camouflage sheets.
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Thirst thorns my throat. When I cough myself awake, I leave the bed and walk alone to the ice machine in the hall, shoveling jewels of it into my mouth with my bare hands, choking on the cold. I feel an urge to find the car and pet its muzzle, to confirm we’ve got a way to leave. The parking lot looks like an iced-over lake and I’m afraid to step onto it.
Our eggplant car is still there, still hot to the touch like a fever. The car parked beside it—too close—is also bruise-purple, but unlike ours there’s no dent in the side, no piss-jars on the dashboard, no pigeon pancaked on the windshield. The bumper’s been brushed like teeth and the moon reads me the license plate. TEXAS.
I should say: My sister doesn’t star in this part of the story, but I need you to know I can see her always, see her face in the reflection of the window like it’s the moon she’s become. But I don’t listen when the moon shakes its head, tells me to turn back. I go closer to the car.
At first I think I hear the engine revving, but there’s no one in the front seat. Then I look to the backseat and there’s a boy on his back, mouth open, brandishing his tongue and snoring so loud, I think it’s the sky making that sound. I step back from the car when I see him wake up. He’s Chinese. The car and his beardlessness and his eyes halving open like seeds.
He swings out of the backseat. Asks my name. Asks in guoyu: _______________? I tell it. I speak with Ma’s accent, wince at how millet-whipped and field-born it sounds next to his, how full of oxshit my mouth is. He asks if I’m alone. He slides his hand into his pocket and I duck, but he takes out a cigarette. I say my name. I say no. He asks if I am Chinese. I say we’re speaking Chinese. He laughs and his teeth are bastard stars, brighter than anything the night owns, no lineage to their light.
I sit in his lap in the backseat. He kisses me a collar of bruises, a shadow to clasp around my neck. He pulls my hair back like reins, calls me by another animal’s name. When he falls asleep, the moon peels off its skin, squeezed to pulp in my hands. I walk back to our room and sit in the bathroom till morning, watch a creek of red ants cross my legs five times. In the morning, Ma asks if I’d dreamed of getting pregnant with a flock of flies that tries to leave through my throat. She told me it happens sometimes, that dream, and you always wake up with your own hands around your neck. Jie traces my neck with her thumb and doesn’t ask. We drive the rest of the way in less than a day. Ma complains that Ba’s bowels are like a waterslide. So we stop at a reservoir and Ba squats on the shore, the knobs of his hips brassy with sweat. His shit floats on the surface, still as a body. We drive far from the crime.
By the time we reach LA, it’s night and we thirst. Our lips crumble off like cake. The car has three more dents, but none of us remember what we hit. Outside the passenger window, I see metal birds the size of trees pecking at the hills, and Jie says they’re derricks, blackening their beaks in oil that comes from the soil.
We share a one-bedroom with a shower curtain down the center of it, our cousin and his cousin and his wife and his mistress and his mistress’s son in one room, us in the other. Our cousin has a tattoo of a snake that begins on the back of his head and ends somewhere below the waist.
Want to guess where the snake ends? he says to Jie, and she says, Don’t forget I used to kill snakes for a living. But he doesn’t know what we did at the chicken farms, doesn’t believe us. He takes our cash and promises us jobs in a few days. He makes us bowls of rice porridge thinner than piss, and we sleep on a mattress with an exposed spring, a hole in the center that we curve our bodies around. We take turns drinking from the faucet, swallowing mouthfuls until our bellies billow out, bigger than anything we could ever birth.
Back in Arkansas we had no faucet, just a hose dangling from the side of the house. Not the kind of hose you know: bigger, bitten by field mice, holes too small for us to see. At night, Jie and I hosed each other down in the dark. Chased each other around the yard even though Ma said someone would see us naked and turn us to salt. But we ran anyway, circling each other until the sky turned over like a bowl and cupped us to the ground. The stars were dandruff and we brushed them off our shoulders.
This is what Jie taught me, but please don’t ever learn it: It’s a trick where you hug the hose nozzle in your throat and shotgun the water straight into your belly without swallowing. She said that’s how the people here drink, without needing a mouth, without a way to stop.
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Deeper into my life, I meet a man who says he drove from Texas to LA by hi
mself, back when he’d been in the country for a year and stole a car from outside a Cracker Barrel. He later drove back for his mother, but he couldn’t remember the route he first took, the one where he passed a casino with two stone dragons by the door. He’d won two hands of blackjack and spent it on his first room in the city: a floor above the butcher’s, a building between a church and the restaurant where Ba fried every genre of meat.
When the man says he undressed me in the parking lot of a motel, I try to recall myself, the girl I prayed inside, the boy I mistook for an engine. I have no alibi for that night, no other body I could have been in.
You know the man. I’m sorry for not saying he’s your father: I wanted you to meet him as I did. I knew his touch before his name. He marries me, but it’s Jie who’s been in my bed the longest: When we shared the mattress, I heard her saddle her wrists every night. Her breath belonging to the back of my neck. She moaned a moat around us both.
On our honeymoon in the suburb south of our city, I see my husband’s face in the dark and remember. Jie and I once learned to sound the same. In Arkansas, we used to test Ma by walking to her bedside in the dark, asking, Who am I? Ma always guessed wrong, always named the absent one. We laughed and said she’d never learn to floss apart our voices, tell her daughters apart.
One night, when I/Jie went to her bedside and asked who I/she was, Ma took out her fist from under the pillow and punched me/her in the throat, that tender cage where our thirsts perch. She said, You sound different in pain. It’s true: Jie wails like some wounded animal. I go silent, as if the wound is an ear that will eavesdrop on me.
In the dark, I pretend it is Jie’s voice saying my husband’s name. It’s her salt in the sweat we make. I am the mattress, the moon, below and above myself. It’s only at the moment of pain that my sister and I individuate. That I’m brought back to my body, reminded it is mine.
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During the week, Ma sews wholesale skirts in the downtown garment district, which I once imagined was an actual city made of garments. Giant scarves for crosswalks, sweaters on all the trees. But no trees here. In Arkansas, I saw rows of cows rigged to machines, their milk pumped like gasoline. We miss the fields fizzing with our piss, the taro we raised behind the church, the rain fucking our mouths full of a sky’s salt. Ma says the factories are worse than farms, where at least a cow could shit whenever it wanted. No bathroom breaks for the ladies.
One time Ma pissed herself and got yelled at, so she started bringing jars to keep under the table. It’s hard to aim and run the needle at the same time, but Ma’s always been coordinated. She can drum my sister and me at the same time, each hand keeping a different beat.
Ma says we have to learn quick in this city. Jie got robbed at gunpoint her first week here, working the cashier at the electronics store. It was a Chinese boy with half a beard, the left side. The boy spoke a dialect we’d heard only in movies. We wondered what part he was playing. Jie thought about playing dead, splaying on the vinyl floor until he left. Kept wondering why the boy only had the left side of his beard.
When the bullet spent itself into the wall behind her, it burrowed there like some nest bird. Ma says, God took a big breath and blew the bullet around your head. Jie says the boy was so stupid, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot the sky. Still, I saw Jie pray that night. She got off the bed and onto her knees, her hair curtaining the bright theater of her teeth. I asked if she was crying. She wiped her nose on my arm and punched me off the bed.
On weekends, Ma cleans houses. You’ve never even cleaned your own room. You blame your brother for the stains on the mattress, but I see you pissing in your sleep too, both of you born with so many leaks, a lineage of them.
I was washing Ma’s pants in the sink and found notes in the pockets, notes she must have stolen from the houses. Some were written on receipts, on napkins, on pink perfumed cards, on orange peels. I wondered why she took what was worth nothing to us, notes we couldn’t read, addressed to anyone but us. If I asked, I knew she’d strike me into silence. Say I shouldn’t go through other people’s pockets. Never put your hands where they aren’t getting paid.
When the notes dried, I balled them together into a paper onion and put it back in her pocket. Imagined her taking the bus out to another house in the hills, hands in her pockets the whole ride west, the noteball hot and pulsing in her palm, pumping like an organ that keeps her alive until she’s home.
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At the mannequin factory, Jie is part of the arm team: She’s the one who counts the number of fingers on each arm before passing it on to the surgical team. The day after a heat wave, Jie and the other girls walk into the factory and see that all the mannequins have melted together into one body, some linked at the hips, others glued elbow-to-elbow. The girls have to spend three days with handsaws to divide the mannequins from one another, and even after that, most are unidentifiable by the standards of their manual. Jie drags them to the dumpster one by one. One of the mannequins has a belly like it’s pregnant: The head of another mannequin has fused to its stomach. When Jie saws the belly open, she finds a single bullet in its center.
We have nothing to shoot it from, so we decide to bury it beneath Ma’s chili shrubs. I am supposed to be watering them and haven’t, so all the chilies are pale as finger-bones. After we bury the bullet, the chilies grow fat as udders. I pick them for Ma, but she says they’ve gone bad. I say they can’t be bad, I just picked them. I pluck the fattest of the chilies and de-stem it with my teeth: She’s right. They taste like rust, like menstrual blood, ripe with shed death.
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I do yard work for an Armenian woman two streets over. Her hose is patched with kiddie Band-Aids, and she only has one tree that requires constant pruning. The tree bears some kind of fruit I have no language for, and when I try to bite into one, the woman slaps it from my hand. She points at her mouth, then mimes gagging. I think she’s telling me they’re poisonous, which only makes me wonder why I’m pruning this tree in the first place. The tree’s branches grow in an upward curve, the shape of a bowl offered up to the sky. The dead branches are black and wax-soft. I climb into the lower branches and amputate the rotten ones, counting each as it drops. The tree one-ups me, rotting two shades blacker when I blink.
Jie says to be careful: The Armenian woman’s husband is a soldier like Ba and shies easily, sometimes even eating the mirror when it shows him his face. The husband doesn’t like people watching him, so I always look at his left ear when he pays me in cash. When I mow their lawn, the husband hides under the sofa and says I’ll never find him. One weekend, the Armenian woman tells me not to come back. She says her husband is afraid of the monkey in the tree. He told her about it. He’s seen it many times.
I say I’ve never seen any monkey. Describe it to me. Her husband says the monkey had a bald red face and a flat nose, hair thick as needles, a tail made of scissor blades. The monkey could climb high, all the way up to the ceiling of the sky, and sometimes it tried to thieve from the tree, pinching the leaves and pocketing the fruit in its cheek. The monkey had beady eyes and looked to be about breeding age. Her husband says the monkey is frightening him. I say I’m not afraid of any monkey, I’ll come anyway. I’ll help kill it. The Armenian lady says no, the monkey might bring fleas or babies, and that’s when I realize the monkey is me.
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Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it’s given birth. The floor is dappled with blood from the earlier fight, when Jie had thrown a knife. It was aimed at Ma but found its destiny in me. The knife landed in the delta of my inner elbow. My blood was dynamic, leaping out in two directions, avoiding the walls.
Earlier we’d been watching a TV broadcast about a serial killer back on the island. The man claimed to be a former emperor reincarnated into a mailman. He’d behea
ded two girls with an axe, claiming they were his concubines from another life and were destined to join him in his death-palace. We reached the place in the footage where the bodies had to be blurred out. There was a head on the sidewalk, an adjacent stain or shadow, and a forensic scientist prodding the head with something like a long fork. Ma said that long ago, our tribe had been headhunters, and that maybe this man was mistaken: In his past life he was not an emperor but a man of our tribe, a hunter in the wrong time. Ma said her grandfather once showed her the head he’d stolen off another tribe’s boy, how it was bloodless like a radish. How one eye still blinked, even days after death, and she waved at it in case it was lonely. For weeks, the whole family fed the head, offered it wine. If the skull learned to love the family, the fields would grow.
Jie said, Enough, I’m trying to listen, and we watched the beheaded girl’s mother get interviewed. The mother said she’d tried walking onto a highway that morning, but god would not let her die, god chose her to outlive grief. Ma said the woman wasn’t chosen, just stupid as a melon: She should have just tried in the evening, when there was more traffic and less visibility. Jie turned off the TV. Ba was asleep on the sofa in his cook uniform, a hairnet that’s mostly holes, bare feet obscene with blue veins.
One time when Ma needed antidiarrheal medicine, Ba spent the money on a beach umbrella he said was wide enough to eat the wind and digest it into flight. He said if we waited for a storm and got under the umbrella and held the handle together, our feet would quit the floor. Ma said she’d beat his ass like a tambourine, but when she saw he’d fallen asleep on the toilet again, she spread a quilt over his body, covering his face like a corpse’s.