Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  “Watch it.”

  “Right now the thing that’s not working is you. Nothing depends on you, do you get that? I wouldn’t even need to replace you.”

  Will felt his breath stoppered by an anger like a swelling second heart, and left Vanya’s apartment, frustrated that he couldn’t slam her automatic door, pissed that she was right: the worst thing about her was him. He thought about how he could damage Vanya just enough to demonstrate his worth. She said she was clean, but dirt was doable. It was only the revealed, exhaustible mystery of the body; the impression, not the fact, of a broken censor.

  At home he drained a quarter bottle of Balvenie and hotkeyed to his porn folder, opening the most recent project file. It was grainy and underlit, but with some careful touch-ups, you could see it: his homemade Vanya porn. From this template it was easy to generate more. He watched them on loop, his virtual Vanyas with faceless men. At five A.M. he sent Vanya a blank email with a thirty-second clip attached. Then he passed out or something.

  The next afternoon he woke with his blood feeling solid. The possibility that Vanya might smash through his front door seemed real enough to confine him to his room, composing and deleting futile apologies.

  But Vanya proved just as eager to move forward, not because she was sorry but because it was unproductive. She texted: bb come over tonite we’ll discuss yr future on the show. It sounded climactic.

  She wasn’t wearing her camera when she greeted him at the door. She led Will to the living room, where there were two full wineglasses. She hoisted herself gymnastically from her chair onto her couch and readied her laptop. Something was amassing in her bearing. She was about to pitch.

  “Baby, I hate fighting. I know the show’s been putting us under some strain, and neither of us meant what we said or did, so let’s not even talk about it.”

  “Fine,” Will said, sitting and finishing his wine.

  “I’ve been thinking about the root of the tension, and I have a plan. I want to hear your thoughts, but you have to hear me out fully. It’ll sound extreme.”

  “I’m hard to shock.”

  “Okay. I want you to consider a procedure”—here Will was thinking castration, or lobotomy—“a really simple one to modify the epicanthic fold on your eyelids and create a supratarsal fold right—”

  Will stood up. “Eyelid surgery? You’re shitting me.”

  Vanya’s glare struck him like the beam of a flashlight. “You said you’d listen. Sit down.” Will sat farther away, and Vanya continued, “It’s a one-hour outpatient procedure that’ll put a subtle crease in each eyelid.”

  “Oh yeah? If it’s so ‘subtle,’ why bother?”

  “Because, listen. This incident has convinced me that you need to start taking steps to confront your persecution complex. First you get suspended—”

  Vanya was referring to that time in college when he’d been heading to Cory’s dorm from Sweet Hall, and was passing Kappa Alpha when a drunk shirtless white guy ran over and picked him up, flipped him head-over-heels as easily as if he’d been filled with feathers, and placed him back down on his feet to the applause of his brothers. Will left and returned wielding a ginkgo branch he’d taken from a landscaping heap, found the guy sitting in a butterfly lawn chair, and swung twice, bloodying the guy’s ear before being tackled (professionally, by a Cardinal fullback), his face pushed so hard into the lawn he couldn’t close his mouth, until campus security arrived. After a disciplinary hearing, where Will unsuccessfully argued that he’d been the victim of a hate crime, they were both suspended.

  “—and now this.”

  “So the solution is to make me less Asian!”

  “Perfect segue to my next point, where I convince you that there’s no such thing as ‘less Asian.’ Do you know where this surgery is most popular? South Korea. With Asian Asians.”

  “So? That’s cultural imperialism.”

  Now Vanya’s glare struck him like the handle of a flashlight. “Don’t condescend to me. I was going to address this later but might as well do it now.” Vanya checked her notes. “What does ‘looking Asian’ mean, exactly? Supposedly it’s a set of morphological features: dark straight hair, brown eyes, gracile build, flatter facial bones and brow ridges, and epicanthic folds.”

  “God help me. Where’d you google this from?”

  “But none of those traits are exclusive to East Asians, and not every East Asian has all or any of these features. So for instance”—Vanya turned her laptop toward Will to show him a photo of a scraggly white guy—“here’s the native Ainu in Hokkaido. They have blue eyes and red hair, but they don’t look European. An eyelid fold doesn’t make you less Asian—that’s like saying straight hair makes you less black. No trait is a necessary or sufficient racial qualifier. It’s a multivariate social construct.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” Will said. “So if I’m no more or less Asian without it, then once again: Why bother?”

  Vanya hid her nose in a steeple of fingertips before speaking again. “Here’s the issue. You walk around thinking that whenever people see your face, they pile on every awful Asian stereotype. You think, oh no, they’re thinking ching-chong, math, kung fu. But that paranoia is just another prejudice that makes you resent total strangers. People overreact to your overreaction, and it spirals from there.” Vanya tapped Will’s wrist, her way of refreshing his attention. “It’s your problem, not anyone else’s. This isn’t about changing your identity, but managing how you think other people perceive you—your projected self-image. Nothing’ll really change except your outlook.” Vanya sneezed and then recovered disconcertingly quickly: “I’m aware I have a different comfort level with cosmetic surgery. I’ve had procedures.”

  Will sucked his tongue. She might know he knew, and be maneuvering to entrap him.

  “Nose, lips, boobs, boob fix, browbone, Lasik. Does that make me ‘fake’? Do I look okay?”

  “Very okay.”

  “I never brought it up because it doesn’t matter. I don’t do it to please men. I do it because, for better or worse, I feel more like myself this way. Everything I am is deliberate. The real issue here isn’t race, it’s fashion, which is about expression and self-determination. Identities don’t happen to you, you create them. You wear what expresses you.”

  “Unless you’re a minority. Then you wear what other people put on you.”

  “Do you dress quote-unquote Asian? No: you’ve adopted Western fashions. Imperialism, cultural exchange, whatever—it beats isolation. North Korea is effed-up because it’s isolated. South Korea has the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world, and it’s flourishing.”

  “Korea’s also hypernationalist and racist and homophobic and patriarchal, if you really want to fuck around with meaningless correlations.”

  “Now my second point is about your mother, who doesn’t have an epicanthic fold. So you wouldn’t even be distancing yourself from your family or your genetic haplogroup.”

  “Vocab?”

  “Your gene pool,” Vanya said. “Tracing you to your geographic roots. Southeast Asians are usually in group C, D, or F.”

  “All the bad grades.”

  “You’re being absurd.”

  “It’s, like, quasi eugenic. Like how sperm donors have to be at least five eight; I hate that shit.” While Will spoke, he could see Vanya chambering her next argument, wearily leaning on her armrest and flicking at her trackpad. “The demand for short men’s semen is so low that most sperm banks won’t bother storing it. And Asians are shorter on average, so guess what happens? As for Asian plastic surgery, the Chinese have this really cool height-enhancing surgery where they snap your shinbones and insert—”

  “Point number three is that you’ve already had your body modified—braces, nasal polyps, circumcision.”

  Will chopped an X into the air. “Ridiculous. The first two were medical. And I didn’t renounce my foreskin.”

  “The motive makes no difference. Okay, now I’ll hear you out. Let me o
pen my notes. Okay. What’s your attachment to the shape of your eyelids?” Vanya sat alert, index fingers at J and F, a blinking cursor in her eyes.

  “I don’t have any. But, I mean—” Will sighed to signal his exhaustion, though this appealed to a type of pity Vanya lacked. “I shouldn’t have to compromise anything.”

  “Because it’s so terrible to be liked! You always talk about how lonely you used to be before we met, always getting overlooked, abandoned. Might this somehow relate to your allergy to compromise?”

  “I can compromise with you. Not with fucked-up social expectations.”

  Vanya typed a bit. “Then compromise for me. I’ll give you a three-day decision period. I’ve recorded our conversation, so I’ll link you to the audio file and my notes if you want to review them. Okay?”

  It was not okay.

  Will left Vanya’s apartment and plunged down a fathomless clickhole, linking Vanya to a battery of eye surgery videos: steel shims levered under eyeballs, incised eyelids tweezed off in tatters, laser-smoke billowing up from dark pink gore. It’s surgery what do u expect, Vanya replied. Will linked her to horror stories of accidental cauterization causing permanent weepiness, and excess fat removal creating ugly hollows, infections, scars. Vanya replied that with enough research, anything would kill you. Then Will argued it’d be too expensive. We’ll expense it, Vanya replied. And cost shouldn’t be a factor when it comes to self-actualization. Admit it, your problem isn’t with the money or the operation. It’s about your fear of change.

  He wasn’t afraid of change, but of being wrong; afraid that the operation would indeed solve his problems, proving that his world-filling rule chart of perceived outrages and dignified withholdings, the emotional calculus that had given him his only secure basis of self-esteem, was after all invalid; that he’d made himself a lifelong victim only of habit. But the only way to prove that it didn’t matter was to do it.

  At the end of the decision period, Will texted her:

  set up the appointment + let’s stop talking about it

  excellent thank u baby

  also i was thinking

  maybe get eyebags done too?

  if ur going in 4 a procedure anyway :)

  wtf is an eyebag

  bulges under eyes

  also lasik?

  not a big deal ;) just spitballin

  fine

  k what day works best

  yesterday

  ur absolutely 100% ok with all this? just making sure

  i rly dont care tbh

  no

  i’m asking to make sure u *do* care

  uh okay

  i dont not care

  Vanya didn’t respond, but a minute later Will saw she’d tweeted: The opposite of caring is not not caring. #mantra

  The next day, Will drove to the oculoplastic surgeon’s office in Marin for his consultation. He nodded along as the old Turkish surgeon walked him through the dual transconjunctival blepharoplasty and the epicanthoplasty—a full incision for the upper lids, lasers to fix the lowers and eyebags in one shot. The surgeon snapped Will’s photo and loaded it into a cosmetic-surgery simulation app; the result came up on a cuttingly hi-def thirty-two-inch monitor. Two swan-backed arcs overscored Will’s eyes. In the gestalt of his face it was subtle, even obscured by his glasses; what troubled him more, at this resolution, were his eyebrows (bushy, thin), mouth (wrinkled his chin when closed), pores (potholes), and nose (a stingerless stingray). This was indeed who he was.

  He filled out medical history and insurance forms, setting the appointment in impossibly short order. In six days Will was nude under a blue hospital gown at Saint Francis Memorial, with a Latina nurse taking his vitals. Her breaths struck his cheek while she drew rings around his eyes with a felt-tip marker to direct the blades and lasers. He registered the difference between eye contact and someone looking at your eyeball. The surgeon helped Will up onto the table in the ER and covered his face with the anesthetic mask, having him count backward until he was dazzled into repose by the honeycomb stare of the surgical lamp that left nothing dark.

  Interlude: 2005

  A few months before the end, Linda gets the university email reminding her to register for graduation and order her cap and gown. She takes it as a final notice. If she hadn’t stagnated in this relationship, she could’ve written a book, made better friends, maybe learned how to DJ . . . at least become reassured of her path to seriousness. Instead all she’s done is get a middling GPA and acquire a wardrobe she’s already sick of.

  Admittedly she could just tell Henrik to give her some space and he’d give it to her. But if it’s not mutual—or better yet, his idea—it’s no bueno. She shouldn’t have to bear the guilt of dumping him; such guilt would imply that her feelings for him were real. What does she owe that she hasn’t already paid? He’s the one who’s dragging things on past their expiration, taking her hostage with his abandonment issues. And with all her posturing and restyling, all his confessed projection and idealization, is he dating her at all? No, only the idea of her.

  Plus he’s been weird. It’s bad timing; too many of the wrong drugs, not enough of the right ones, and lack of sleep to boot (he never does get comfortable sharing a bed). He stops eating and his body seems to cook down in sweat. His thoughts come from elsewhere, fast. One night at three A.M. he comes from the bathroom and wakes her to insist he’s heard a voice in the shower drain screaming for help; she writes it off as sleepwalking. She doesn’t take his tripped-tongue monologuing as a sign of incipient anything, nor his new interest in sex—she figures he’s just getting his fill now that he senses her drifting.

  I’ll just disappear, she thinks, peace the fuck out. She sleeps in the library and the lounges of other dorms. But he never could do subtext or irony; the more she ignores him, the longer and oftener his emails get. Cory tells her that Henrik’s been sitting shiva in his room and she had to talk him out of filing a Missing Persons report. Will texts Linda saying she’s being a real fucking hatchet wound. So she avoids them too—may as well cut all the balloon strings.

  She stealths back to their room during one of his lectures to get her laptop, but he’s there, and something’s up. He is untame. His eyes have trouble closing. “I don’t get it,” he says.

  “I don’t get what you’re not getting.”

  “Why you’re avoiding me.”

  “You really don’t want to hear it,” she says, meaning: please don’t make me say it.

  “Actually I do.”

  Instigate, she thinks, coax something real out of him. But it’s like trying to juice a golf ball. “You’ve got no life of your own and it puts the burden on me to be interesting for the both of us. It’s dragging me into mediocrity.”

  “Okay, I apologize for that.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Oh, stop. Please stop fucking boring me with your sheepish apology voice. It makes me want to rip my body off. The whole knee-jerk reflexive steez is pathetic. I don’t care if you’re sorry. It doesn’t do anything. Apologizing is way easier than being a person, isn’t it? How long do I have to wait until you form your own opinions? Or come up with something to do besides watch movies and grill and go to bars? Like, you haven’t even given me an orgasm. Don’t you fucking say you’ll try to change because then you’re just obeying me again. And I’m four years younger. I mean, Jesus.”

  Here the echo begins. She knows exactly what he’s thinking: I knew it; I called this, and I deserve this. His null hypothesis—that he has nothing to do with anybody else, is fundamentally unable to bring joy to anybody else or have joy reflected back onto him—has been confirmed.

  “It’s an impasse,” he says. A tower imploding inside him. “You think I’m oblivious to what you want, but you still want me to intuit your feelings, even though you deliberately mislead me about them, possibly to test my intuition, which you use to gauge the depth of my understanding and caring for yo
u. You pretend that doesn’t mean anything to you. If it doesn’t, then you should just break up with me.”

  Midfight she will not admit she’s been faking anything. Escalate, she thinks. Screaming is easy. Provoke, retreat, and repeat. Shoving out dramatic soundscapes as enormously as possible, even though now it feels pro forma. “No, the issue is you’re an insecure fucking loser who’s constantly trying to get his own niceness validated by being overbearingly apologetic to the point that I have to feel like a total asshole if I don’t forgive you and tell you everything’s all right. You’re the one who’s projecting on me.”

  She tells him he’s so insecure he’s postmodern. He says she’s being emotionally litigious. She says things might have worked if he’d been less eager to please. He says he won’t let her get away with the past tense. Once it’s clear words are getting them nowhere, she splashes a glass of water across his waist and leg, then slides open a window and drops his laptop out. He knows her method: picking an absurd fight, then using his wrong-footed reaction as proof that he hates her, when it’s clearly the provocation itself he hates.

  “You know, I fucked another guy—” Utterly, she lies. “You forgive me for that?”

  That should be that. He turns away; great, he wants me to yank the thorn from his paw, she thinks, until he reaches up to the ceiling fan and snaps a blade off. He wings it at the mirror on their door and it cracks in a spider-legged burst. “There. Violence. Drama. Isn’t that interesting?” he says. “You can have the room, I don’t need it.” He leaves, slamming the door: shardfall.

  Wow, she thinks, that sort of worked. Inwardly she thanks Mr. Hyde for the leverage. It is the middle of the day, so nobody’s around to hear, and too bad, this kind of insolence thrives on witnesses. She stops by the bathroom to puke—not unusual for her, though she must smother down an ugly epiphany that putting their relationship in jeopardy is making her affection quicken, like how a propeller seems to spin faster just after the motor cuts. Cheap orchestrated conflict is still titillating. The kind of excitement that might’ve reignited the relationship if she weren’t so determined to extinguish it.