by Lisa Ko
She bought a bus ticket to Florida, but had told him they weren’t moving. It made no sense. “So she wasn’t in jail? I always thought it was another man. Though she was going to marry Leon.”
“I don’t know.” Vivian picked up the junk mail and tossed the flyers into a plastic bin. “We waited and waited for her. You remember, all those months. I wouldn’t have paid off her debt if I knew she was coming back. I wouldn’t have given you away.”
Had his mother been in jail while he was listening to records in Ridgeborough, when he and Angel had taken the cab to the old apartment? But she’d also known about his adoption? Daniel put the knife down. He had once stood with his mother and Leon on the Staten Island Ferry, both of them with their arms around him, their love sure and shining, the kind of gesture Kay and Peter tried to offer up but he could never bring himself to fully accept. He had lost so much, and he was lost. The distance between then and now felt enormous.
Now he was nervous that Michael and Timothy’s arrival home would puncture the unexpected calm he had felt, being alone with Vivian all day. But when Michael did come home, after Daniel had taken a shower and a long nap, Daniel’s dread disappeared. It felt good to be with people who didn’t know him as a fuck-up.
After dinner, after his second helping of soup, then a third, Michael said, “Want to play pool? There’s a place in Bay Ridge.”
At the pool hall they got beers and played eight ball. Daniel made the break and called solids. “I spoke to my mom again, by the way. Your mom thinks maybe she got caught up in an Immigration raid and thrown in jail and deported and that’s why she ended up in China.”
“Damn. Did you ask her about it when you talked to her?”
“I didn’t have the guts. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.” He aimed for a side pocket and missed. “Thanks, though. You helped me get in touch with her.”
“Yeah, of course, of course. So are you going to talk to her again?”
“We’ll see.”
Michael leaned onto the table and into his cue stick. “Twelve to the ten. Corner pocket.” He made the shot.
“You’re good,” Daniel said. “Where’d you learn to play like that?”
“I play a lot with my friends. Some of them like to bet, but I don’t. Hey, remember that research assistant job I was telling you about? I turned the application in. I decided to go with the project I wanted to do, the riskier one. Guess I have you to thank.”
There were video games across the room but Daniel didn’t see video poker. “What did I do?”
“You inspired me.”
“I don’t know anything about science.”
“I mean, you’re doing music, you’re in this amazing band, you’re living with your friends in the city. I can’t even afford to move out of my parents’ apartment unless I get this grant. I have to commute three hours to school and back and my mom grills the hell out of me if I stay out late. Instead of doing the safe thing, you’re like—free.”
After Michael knocked down four balls in one round, Daniel managed to drop a solid ball. “I’m not an inspiration. I got kicked out of the band. I owe my friend ten thousand bucks and she won’t talk to me anymore. I got kicked out of school.”
“You did? Why?”
“You know how you said some of your friends like to bet? I guess I do, too.” Daniel finished his beer. He told Michael about the poker, the expulsion.
“Shit,” Michael said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“I kind of wanted to leave anyway.”
“Are you going to go back?”
“My parents want me to transfer to the school where they teach, upstate.”
“Do you want to go there?” The kindness in Michael’s question gave Daniel déjà vu.
“No. Though sometimes it seems like I don’t have a choice.”
Michael adjusted his watchband. “I remember what you were like after your mother left. You thought she left because of you. You blamed yourself.”
“I was a kid. I didn’t know what was going on.”
“I know it was a long time ago.” Michael laughed a little. “But I just want you to be okay. And if you’re not okay, I guess that’s fine, too.”
“I am okay.” As he said it, it he knew it was true.
“I miss her,” Michael said, “your mother. She was always real nice to me.” He picked up his cue and studied the table. “Eight ball, side pocket.” Daniel leaned against the edge, trying to distract Michael from scoring the winning shot, but Michael sank the ball and Daniel whooped, high-fiving him.
THE APARTMENT WAS QUIET, everyone asleep except Daniel, who was on the living room couch. He looked at a picture of Michael in a cap and gown at his high school graduation, framed and hung on the wall over the television, along with a large department-store studio portrait of Vivian, Michael, and Timothy posing against a blue backdrop. Peter and Kay had one like it in their living room, with Daniel in the middle, taken several Christmases ago at the JCPenney’s at the Littletown Mall. They had a framed picture of him from his high school graduation, too.
On the bottom shelf of a cabinet below the TV, Daniel found a row of photo albums. He removed one and flipped through the pages, saw pictures of Vivian and Timothy’s wedding, faded portraits of people he didn’t know, a younger Timothy with a full head of hair. He knew there wouldn’t be any photos with himself in them but he kept looking, album after album, as if the next page would be the one where he would finally see Deming.
PART THREE
Tilt
Thirteen
If we plot the supply curve and the demand curve on the same graph, we see that, in an efficient market, they intersect at an equilibrium price and quantity.” Professor Nichols pressed a button and the PowerPoint advanced, displaying a black-and-white graph. Fifty students sat at long tables arranged bleacher-style up the back of Peterson Hall, most studying their laptops, multiple chat windows dotting their screens like hungry mosquitoes. One woman in the back had headphones on, not bothering to hide her laughter as she watched a movie on her tablet.
“We call this p and q, respectively,” Professor Nichols said, twisting the end of his gray ponytail. Daniel Wilkinson sat in the next to last row, to the right of Amber Bitburger, watching the guy in front of him play online poker. The guy’s neck was pink, his back set in a hard line. He kept betting too much on terrible hands and losing, and Daniel couldn’t look away. The software that prevented him from playing was still installed on his laptop, and he hadn’t seen a game in months. Unable to stand it a moment longer—the guy’s back was so close he could almost touch it—he leaned until he was halfway over the table. The guy was wearing headphones but Daniel could hear the exact sound the cards made as they shuffled, a decisive, brassy bronze. He leaned closer. “Hey,” he whispered. Amber glanced over. “Don’t do it,” Daniel said, as the guy’s finger hovered over the bet button on an eight of clubs and a three of hearts. “Damn it!” Daniel said out loud, as the guy clicked.
The guy twisted around, his ears reddening. “What the fuck?” he hissed.
Professor Nichols said, “Gentlemen, is there a problem up there?”
Daniel slumped down. Amber looked at him and mouthed, “What was that about?”
After four months in New York City, Ridgeborough seemed smaller, shabbier, and more remote. The teenagers in the Dunkin’ Donuts appeared younger than he’d looked when he was their age, and the Food Lion, with its wide, empty aisles and piped-in Lite Oldies music, evoked gloom. There were so many cereals, so many brands of toothpaste, and yet so few people; you could practically see tumbleweeds rolling down the floor past the sodas and chips.
Summer session was a four-month semester crammed into six weeks; he was in classes weekdays from nine to five. “Good training for the working world,” Kay said. Mornings, Daniel felt like he’d been dug out of the ground and had to relearn how to walk. He would fall asleep in class, jerk awake, obsess about Psychic Hearts and the acclaim N
ate was receiving that was supposed to be his.
On May 15, he had left the city at dawn, arriving in Ridgeborough in time to meet with the dean. That night, as Nate and Roland played for Hutch and Daniel’s co-workers, Daniel had apologized to Peter and Kay. “We can’t take you seriously until you take yourself seriously,” Peter said. Kay had been able to get him into two classes, in her and Peter’s departments: Comparative Politics and Microeconomics 101. Eight hours of daily lectures felt isolating, and Daniel felt aggrieved, but also committed, superior; it was good for him, like going to the dentist or holding the door for a slow-walking stranger when you were in a rush.
After Econ, Amber Bitburger, whom he used to sit behind in Mrs. Lumpkin’s sixth-grade class, walked out with him into the full heat of a June afternoon. The onslaught of sunlight made his eyes sting after a long morning inside the windowless lecture hall, where the air conditioning always seemed to be set to fifty-five degrees. He removed his sweatshirt, and, in a green Meloncholia Records T-shirt with a picture of a cantaloupe on a turntable, bared his arms for the walk across the quad.
“What was that about?’ Amber asked.
“That dude was losing hard. I wanted to help.” Daniel had looked for the guy after class, but lost him in the shuffle to leave Peterson Hall.
“A bunch of us are getting drinks on Saturday at the Black Cat,” Amber said, in her shaggy but upbeat voice. She still lived at home, still hung out with the same friends she’d had in high school, and was taking summer classes so she could finish college in three years.
“That sounds fun.” On Saturdays, Daniel would join Amber, Kelsey Ortman, and their other friends for beers at one of the two animal-named bars on Main Street in Littletown, down the hill from the Carlough campus: the Black Cat and the Spotted Cow. One week, there’d been an off-campus party, a near-duplicate of the parties he had gone to at Potsdam, white people dancing badly to corny hip-hop in a ramshackle house, beer bongs and screaming guys in baseball caps, someone barfing on the front lawn.
“They have an Open Mic there on Thursdays. Didn’t you used to be into music in high school, with Roland Fuentes?” Amber pronounced it Fen-Teez. “Wasn’t he, like a little off in high school, with the green hair? He wore eyeliner.”
“I used to play guitar. We had a few bands back then.”
Amber’s white-blonde hair was almost transparent in the sun. “A bunch of us should check out the Open Mic one night.”
“Sure, that sounds good,” Daniel said, though he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less.
“HARRY’S CLASS WILL BE a good entrée for you into the world of economics,” Peter said at dinner, “a solid foundation for your future. There are so many ways that knowing economic theory can help enrich your life, from tracking your budget to knowing how to manage your stock portfolio. If only they made it a required class for all undergraduates.”
Kay asked him how Melissa’s class was today. Melissa was Professor Schenkmann, a heavyset woman who wore long dresses in eighties prints, geometric overlapping shapes in hot pinks and lavenders. Daniel remembered going to her house as a kid, summer barbecues with other faculty families.
“Good,” Daniel said. Professor Schenkmann always made it a point to call on him, as if she was doing a favor to Kay, ensuring he got his tuition’s worth.
They were having broccoli and chicken Parmesan. At least Kay had ceased her efforts to cook Chinese food. These efforts flared up periodically, once after they’d visited the Hennings and Elaine had given her a cookbook, and another time after he’d gone to a weeklong camp for Chinese adoptees, where the college-aged counselors, also adoptees, talked with such bare emotion that he felt embarrassed for them. Angel had learned how to make oddly sweet won tons that summer, but he was the only kid there who had been adopted past the age of infancy, who remembered anything about his birth mother.
Kay had become careful around him, overly solicitous. He knew she worried when he went out for drinks, so he made sure to be home by midnight, which wasn’t hard; there was only so much time he could stand being around Amber and her friends. He could see how it reassured her. All it took to make her and Peter happy was to come home and go to Carlough, say he was going to GA meetings.
After dinner, Peter called Daniel upstairs to the study, where he was kneeling on the carpet with a mess of computer cables, whistling softly. “Where does this go?” Peter peered over his reading glasses.
“Here, let me.” Daniel took the cord and tried several slots before a green light flashed on the speakers.
“Aha. Take a seat.” Peter cleared some old bills from a folding chair, typed in a website address and pulled up a YouTube screen. “Look at that, you can get all kinds of music for free online. The other day, I watched footage from a concert I attended in 1978. Aerosmith at the War Memorial Arena in Syracuse. I was twenty-one—your age. Can you imagine, a concert you go to today, seeing it online in forty years?”
This was the most Peter had said to him in months that wasn’t lecture-based. “Is that what we’re going to watch now? Did you see yourself in the audience?”
“No, you can only see the stage, and barely even that. Video technology was primitive back then.” Peter pressed play. “But here, listen to that.”
It was video footage of an actual record spinning as it played Jimi Hendrix’s “1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” Daniel and Peter sat in their chairs and listened as the track slowed to a break and picked up again. Creeping, plodding. “That backwards tape, it’s a slow burn,” Peter said. “They didn’t need computers to make good music in those days.”
“It’s a good track, Dad. One of his best.”
“I used to listen to this song when I was a kid. The age you were when you came to live with us in Ridgeborough. I had a few of my older brother’s records that he left behind when he took off for college. We used to share a room, and after he left I’d sit on his bed and listen to his records. That’s where I got my music taste from, your Uncle Phil. They say you always maintain a fondness for the first records you listened to. Like you and Hendrix.”
“I listened to music before Hendrix.” There’d been music in the city, plenty of it, and even Hendrix seemed kind of childish to him now.
The song transitioned into red-tipped sparkles, feedback and clanging bells. A shift in keys felt like the sun peeking through the clouds. “I’m working on some new music,” Daniel said. “Trying to, at least. You’d like it, it’s just vocals and guitar, no computers. It’s really different from what Roland and I were doing.”
Peter delivered a few soft slaps to the back of Daniel’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re back in school. Glad you’re back at home.”
How easy it was to make Peter proud, how hungry he was for Peter’s approval. “I know.”
AT THE FOOD LION, picking up groceries for Kay, he heard a voice go, “Hey! Wilkinson!” and saw Cody Campbell in a cashier’s uniform, waving to him from one of the registers. Cody looked mushier than he’d been in high school, where he had played football; he was still bulky, but his muscle had converted to fat.
Daniel got into Cody’s checkout line. “Hey, Cody.”
“I heard from Amber and Kelsey that you’re back in town. Thought I’d see you around.”
“What have you been up to?”
“Same old, same old.” Cody scanned a package of frozen peas. “Hoping to get out to Colorado soon. Couple buddies of mine are there. Bryan Mitchell and Mike Evans? They’re going, too. Mike’s brother lives out there, says they legalized weed. You can walk into a store and pick up edibles there, like you’re going to the grocery store. You can buy it with your credit card, get stoned, like right there.”
“Wow. Colorado, huh?”
“Yeah. You coming out to the Black Cat tomorrow?”
“I think I’m busy,” Daniel said.
The next night, the phone rang on the landline and Kay called up the stairs. “It’s for you, Daniel.” He was staring at h
is notes for Professor Schenkmann’s class. Their final assignment, three short essays, were due tomorrow, and he hadn’t begun. When he tried to work on them he would end up googling Psychic Hearts, which was how he found out they were playing Jupiter at the end of August.
He picked up the extension in the study.
“Hey, it’s Cody. You want to grab a beer?”
“I would, but—another night.”
Daniel was about to hang up when Cody said, “Hey, you still smoke?”
They drove out to the pond at the bottom of Cedar Street, where they had hung out on summer nights in high school. Cody pulled his Jeep into a clearing at the edge of the woods and parked.
“You still live with your folks?” Daniel asked, as they passed a bowl back and forth. He couldn’t see anything outside, the darkness vast, the silence eerie. He switched on the radio, which was tuned to a classic rock station. Pearl Jam flew out.
“Yeah, but—” Cody flicked the lighter. “I’m getting out soon. Got to save up.”
Daniel took another hit. Several moments passed, and the familiar, grateful fuzziness arrived. He leaned back in the passenger seat, thinking he should buy weed off Cody and go to class high. “For Colorado.”
“Right. I have to get my cash money in order, you know? I have some debt I have to pay off, but I’m working on it.”
“I have some of that, too. Debts.”
“Sucks, man. Fuck a debt.” Cody packed another bowl. The car was choked with smoke. “Hot-boxing in the front of my Jeep,” he sang to the tune of “Party in the U.S.A.” His voice wasn’t half bad.
“Nice. You should record an album. Roland and I recorded one a few weeks ago, with this record collective in the city. Meloncholia? You know it? The band, Psychic Hearts, we’re playing a show on August 18 at Jupiter. This club down in the city. ”
“In Colorado,” Cody was saying, “there’s mountains everywhere. You can live on a mountain and ski to work. That’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know how you could live in New York Shitty. It’s fun to party in, but it smells like a bag of assholes. Anyway, I couldn’t live in one of those little apartments that cost nine thousand bucks a month. I want a house in a mountain. A whole house in a whole motherfucking mountain.”