Watering Heaven

by Liu, Peter Tieryas

  We got to Rick’s car and I jumped in to grab his camera. When I popped out, Jenna was standing right next to me. I could feel her breath on my skin. She tottered into me, tangled her arms with mine.

  “Take out your camera,” she said. I took it out. She pressed her body against mine. “Why don’t you let me inspire you?”

  She was about to take off her top when I stopped her. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “I don’t… I don’t like doing this kind of photography. I don’t think it’s artistic or fresh. It’s just T&A.”

  She stared at me disappointed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I understand.”

  We headed back without another word.

  III.

  I sat alone feeling miserable.

  “What’s wrong, man?” Rick asked.

  “Nothing.”

  We were back in the tent when two photographers came our way. One was short, stocky, with a ‘50s-style suit and a fedora. He had an oblong face that seemed very smug and insecure at the same time, carrying a pair of binoculars attached to a box.

  “3D photography,” he explained. Looking through the glasses, each slide had an image that popped out. It was pretty amazing as the flat plane of normal visual imagery seemed more vivid and raw: images of men tied up by women, ribald playfulness rampant.

  His companion was an obese male who’d shaved his head. He had a thick beard and gruff voice, his posture imperious and overbearing. “So what’s your story?” he said to the girls. “’Cause you guys realize this is a ‘networking’ party, the key word being networking. Ever since I’ve gotten here, you guys isolated yourselves. Why’s that?”

  “We didn’t isolate ourselves. We were just having a smoke.”

  “For the past two hours?”

  They introduced themselves: Jacob, the big one, Jefferson, the shorter one.

  “I hate it when models think they can give feedback to us,” Jacob said. “We’re the artists. Just shut up and pose. That’s why we’re hiring you. But no, they always want to give input.”

  “I don’t think input hurts,” Jefferson said. “I’ve gotten some of my best work done through suggestions.”

  “I’m the total opposite. Whenever models give input, they don’t see the big picture. I try to explain things I see in my head, but they just don’t get it. I’m like, just trust me. I know what I’m doing. It always works that way. Suppose you take their input and it comes out like crap. You think they’ll take responsibility? No, but suppose I’m a total asshole and I force my vision on them. Even if they’re not happy, if it turns out awesome, they’ll forget everything and praise me afterwards. That’s the way it works. I don’t give a damn what they think.”

  “I know your work,” Jenna said. “I’m a big fan.”

  “That’s good,” Jacob replied. “I’m amused by you.”

  “By me?”

  “I want you to be in one of my projects.”

  “Really?” she said with a surprised gesture, cheeks turning red.

  They chatted while I went to grab a drink with Rick.

  “That guy gets on my nerves,” Rick said.

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, we’ve met.”

  “Is he good?”

  “He’s famous. He gets his stuff shown in galleries all the time.”

  “Why don’t you like him?”

  Rick kind of shrugged. “It’s his attitude, he thinks he knows it all. Guys like that just rub me the wrong way. I think no matter where you are in life, you gotta always stay humble. There’s a couple girls he dated. They told me he didn’t treat them well, verbally abusive. But they didn’t care because he was famous. He gets girls lined up all the time man. That could be you, you know.”

  I laughed. “Does fame make it okay for you to treat people like crap?”

  Rick laughed. “Course not. Then again, I’m not famous,” laughing more. “You want to get going?”

  I thought about Jenna. “Yeah, I’m kinda tired.”

  When we got back to the tent, Jacob was saying, “–this hardcore porn actor but he’d gotten so sick and tired of it, he gave up sex and became a monk. Said sex wasn’t fun anymore.”

  They laughed hard.

  “We’re gonna get going,” Rick said.

  “What about karaoke?” Jenna asked.

  “You still want to go?” I asked.

  “Of course! Can we?”

  “Yeah. Rick?”

  “Naw man, I’m too tired. You go have fun.”

  I nodded. “I’ll have to get my car but I can meet you guys there.”

  “All right!” Jenna exclaimed. “You’re coming with us, right?” she asked Jacob.

  “Uhh, I don’t know if that’s my thing.”

  “Oh c’mooooooonnnnnn,” she said.

  Jacob laughed. “I am curious to observe you in that setting.”

  Desdemona, glum and feeling ignored, muttered, “We gotta wake up early tomorrow.”

  “We’ll just be there for one hour.”

  It was settled.

  IV.

  Koreatown has different rules from the rest of Los Angeles. People can smoke indoors and drink alcohol past the 2 a.m. cutoff. The parking lot was filled with ‘rice rockets,’ Hondas and BMWs upgraded to be racing cars. The karaoke station was on the second story in a big plaza. After we entered, we were escorted by a cute young Korean girl to a station in the back. We passed several rooms with tinted glass panels where we could hear accented voices blaring John Lennon and Phil Collins. “Can we get a soju and tambourines?” I asked the girl.

  The room comfortably fit ten people. It had a big television with gigantic speakers. A strobe light illuminated the room in iridescence. After a toast, we took shots. The three were too nervous to grab the mike so I started by singing “Hotel California.” Jenna took a shot and sang “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Desdemona had her arms crossed with a stern look. “They don’t even have Justin Timberlake,” she said glumly. Flipped through a few pages, sitting in a foul mood.

  “I’ll pick a song for you guys.” I selected a Spice Girls song, another by Cyndi Lauper. Desdemona got into it, suddenly setting up a queue. I was relieved, realized Jenna and Jacob were quiet. I turned and saw the two were making out in the corner. Something stabbed me inside. I tried to ignore it by singing. After three songs, I looked back and noticed she was watching me to make sure I was watching her. In some strange way, I realized she was paying me back for what she’d earlier perceived as a rejection.

  “I can’t believe the selection is so small,” Desdemona complained again. “In San Francisco, they had so many more.” As she complained and hogged all the singing time, I saw Jenna and Jacob sneak away.

  “We’re gonna use the restroom,” Jenna explained.

  They returned thirty minutes later, Jenna’s hair a disheveled mess.

  “Will you stop singing so goddamn loud?” I barked at Desdemona.

  She glared at me. “Excuse me?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “What went and crawled up your ass?”

  Jenna was giggling with Jacob.

  I grabbed the side of my chair. I felt dizzy while Desdemona sang a Mandy Moore song about true love. I wished I could turn the camera on myself, take a shot, capture my jealousy and longing. But I knew it wasn’t possible and I felt bitter that my emotions couldn’t be documented, airbrushed, then categorized comfortably away.

  It was 4 a.m. when we got out. Jenna left with Jacob. Desdemona drove off on her own. I got home an hour later, couldn’t sleep. Went to my computer, stared at the images of Jane and Lane. I felt pain coursing through my veins, unadulterated pain. It wasn’t Jenna; it wasn’t Jane. It was me. And I cried, I wept: I felt so alone. As the tears poured out, it occurred to me that this sensation of wanting to rip my innards out, this raw feeling of agony I wanted to eradicate, this was what I’d been hiding from. I wept, but I laughed. Without anywh
ere to hide, I felt like I’d been released from the grip of fabricating lies to make things prettier than they were. I selected all the images of Jane and Lane, dropped them in the trash bin, hit delete. Something shook inside me and it felt good not to have to worry about framing, to relish the moment, to be exposed and nude—to be real.

  V.

  In the following weeks, I prepared for another shoot. I wanted to cover a gamut of smaller urban legends: a woman bitten by a cobra at a supermarket, a cactus exploding with an army of tarantulas, an AIDS Mary who infected hapless men and sent them letters welcoming them to ‘the world of HIV.’ I hired eleven models, including Rick’s friend Tara. I had the usual crew at hand, took over ten thousand photos, and knew I was going to discard 9900 of them. As I clicked away, I wondered, if a person could discard 99% of their life and experience only the best 1%, would they think life a grand and beautiful thing?

  On the fourth night of the shoot, I went to grab some Italian food with Tara. Tara was cute, lithe, tanned with a nimble figure. She was nineteen, with the face of a ten-year-old and the body of a blossoming twenty-year-old. She was Greek, though she wielded a British accent, and she’d spent half her life in Japan training as a kendo artist. I was apologizing about turning down her idea of photographing her performing martial arts in the nude.

  She laughed it off. “Don’t worry about it.” We chatted about some other topics. “I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Where do you get your ideas for your shoots?”

  I thought about it. “I do research online and there’s a bunch of books I go through. I focus a lot on phobias and I pick ones I think work on film.” I thought of something from long ago and laughed to myself.

  “What?”

  “When I was eight, my piano teacher told me if you leave a chair out while you’re sleeping, a ghost’ll come and sit in it, watching while you sleep. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to sleep with a chair pulled out.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No. I still have to put chairs in before I sleep.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder and laughed. “You poor thing,” she said.

  “You know what’s even weirder?”

  “What?”

  “A lot of things you’ll swear aren’t urban legends are actually urban legends. And sometimes, you hear about something so ridiculous, you know it can’t be real, it’s gotta be an urban legend—but it isn’t.”

  “How do you tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not?”

  I was struck by the question, so simple and yet hitting at the core of the issue that had plagued me so long. “Do you know when you’re having a dream, it feels real, like it’s really happening? And you fight and get pissed off and you’re like, why is this happening? Or if you’re having a good dream, you’re like, this is too good to be true.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I think the only way for you to tell it was a dream is to wake up,” I said. Before I could explain further, the waiter came by. “We better order before it gets too late,” I suggested.

  She nodded. “I’m really hungry.”

  “So am I.”

  Then thought to myself, I’m awake now. I am awake.

  Cold Fusion

  Frank Guo, engineer for SolTech Industries, figured out the solution to cold fusion while visiting the aquarium with his wife, Amanda. The grail of endless supplies of energy produced in a tiny box with water electrolyzed on top of palladium had been deemed ‘pseudo-science’ in many corners. He realized the problem hadn’t been with the particles. Not even the math. It was relationships.

  It triggered when Amanda told him about an experiment where small sharks and fish were placed in a tank together. A transparent glass partition separated the two. Whenever the sharks instinctively moved to devour the fish, they banged their heads against the wall. A month of this and scientists removed the partition. The sharks had it so ingrained that the fish couldn’t be eaten, they’d leave them alone, even if they were floating right next to them.

  Fish became atoms, and Frank realized electrons weren’t all that different from humans. Negative, positive energy, fission, anomalous heat production, mysterious reactions. Quarks were feisty sons of bitches and the Heisenberg uncertainty was just another name for someone who was moody.

  Normally, the discovery would have been a moment of joy. But Amanda also had an announcement. “I’m leaving for China next week.”

  “For how long?” he asked.

  “Permanently.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed. “Things haven’t been the same since…”

  And he knew she meant the moment she’d been diagnosed with diabetes. “I hate that I can’t have sugar whenever I want,” she said. “What’s the point of the American dream if I can’t have sweets?”

  Or the freedom to be fat. He barely recognized himself in the mirror anymore because the two gorged on desserts so much. His belly was more like a mountain and hers was no different. Pang fuqi, she joked. The fat couple.

  Frank worked in a huge lab with a fusion generator that looked like it was from Star Trek. Unfortunately, his job was clerical. Administrative. Boring. Even if it involved explosions that could rip the planet in two.

  How to convince her to stay? he wondered. Tell her he discovered a way to provide interminable supplies of energy to the world? Tell her he’d make the sun obsolete by understanding that electrons were as whimsical as fireflies? Then again, it wasn’t like he would tell anyone his solution. SolTech Industries had the nasty habit of canning people who made important discoveries. Liabilities, the lawyers said. Basically, they didn’t want anyone to receive credit or financial compensation. Better to draw them out, take baby steps so he’d keep his job, mislead them just enough.

  Part of his cynicism came from the fact that all his bosses cared about was promoting themselves to more grandiose titles, executive of this and president of that. They lived off the achievements of past years, eliciting grants like vultures, their hypocrisies more manifold than wavelengths of sound. Not that Amanda cared. She just wanted her chocolate tapioca dipped in caramel and red bean.

  He remembered that on their eighteenth date together, he explained how superstrings were reverberations in other dimensions that caused the physical manifestations in our universe. Marriage gurus said it was reverberations in our desires that caused attraction. Amanda had a confused look. Why was it so hard for him to simply say I love you?

  Maybe because his nerves were fused together, like hydrogen particles that combined until they exploded and caused a catastrophic detonation. He wanted to hold Amanda that much.

  “I’ve already bought the ticket,” she said.

  “I’ve discovered the solution to cold fusion,” Frank sputtered out.

  She looked at him and said, “That’s nice…” She lowered her head. “Maybe next time, you can just find out how to say, Don’t go.”

  After Amanda left, Frank watched manta rays chase hammerhead sharks, and tropical fish slither through corals. His fingers were interlaced. He bought a slice of cheesecake and took a bite. It tasted bitter.

  Colony

  For three minutes, the whole world is green, a throbbing pulse of underwater grass. Then my depth perception dissolves into a flat canvas, and my co-workers look like 2D animation drawn by minimum-wage artists in Korea. I can smell scientific theories the way I smell my memories: relativity is sugar mixed with a dissolving chocolate soufflé, and all the lovers I’ve disappointed remind me of overcooked salmon simmering in burnt coffee and impossible expectations. I experience four cyclical deaths every day: lavatory, office politics, televised Internet, and dreamless sleep. I can’t even drive myself; it’s my wife who has to explain that cars aren’t computerized seeds of death holding together the infrastructure of a faulty CPU. Partitions are real; social divides are inseparable; no one in the world sees what I do. And what do I see? The d
octors told me that brain imaging had revealed a colony of tapeworms in my brain. Seventy of them, a whole family, feeding on the folds of tissues that weave the tapestry of my CPU. They must have been starving before they used some unknown enzyme to break through my blood-brain barrier. I’ve been advised to have them killed. There are drugs to decimate them. But I feel guilty. They have a right to live, even if it’s at my expense. My wife insists parasites don’t have souls. But I have to believe they do, because if they didn’t, what would it mean for me? I suck bliss and inject sorrow into the earthy hues of my deaf wife who insists she loves me with her lips. They’re dry with strips of flesh peeling off and she licks them intermittently. I can sometimes hear the worms describe her as a cosmic irregularity that disappears with the swells of gravity. They want to eat my cochlea to re-establish balance. Since their arrival, I’ve experienced emotions as sound: depression is cathartically cacophonous; love is ominously quiescent. Regret drums lightly until the ululations become frustrating and drown everything else out. I sometimes spot old friends who tell me about their unlived lives, and we play chess with our unfulfilled ambitions until my wife asks who I’m talking to. Everyone, I tell her, as though air molecules had ears. I wish I could converse with electrons so they’d act as translators to the tapeworms. I’d experience their fear at the impending apocalypse, Armageddon being my eventual death, a neurological explosion that translates to darkness and inactivity. There’s no way to save them. They have no future hope. Yet they cling. So I cling. And the universe is a flat and green frying pan where I cook the omelet of my life at an old café that serves brunch sunny side up.

  Unreflected

  An autopsy of time would expose midnight at this LA rave as a buildup of greedy seconds poisoned by impatience. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to split my brain open, unraveling my memories like noodles that’d squirm because I’d boiled them too long. Melancholy weaves her way around my noodle and I split into a million different versions of myself.