Watering Heaven

by Liu, Peter Tieryas

  I’m attending the event because an old colleague is catering and I’m assisting. The theme is Locust, or hunger, a charitable masquerade pretending to empathize with the impoverished and destitute. There’s thousands who’ve starved the whole week to gather at this factory on the outskirts of town and smoke exotic herbs to alter their perceptions. Many of the women resemble spirits with all the smoke around us, rippling into thin, meandering mirages. What would a lifetime with any of them be like? I spot a Chinese girl who’s statuesque enough to fit into Roman porn if she had chipped breasts and an ivory ass. She notices my glance, approaches and introduces herself as, “Ella. I combined the Spanish words for the feminine and masculine the.”

  “I’m Will,” I reply.

  She shakes my hand. “Tell me a secret.”

  “Why don’t you go first?” I suggest.

  She simpers. “I’ve lost my reflection.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me show you.”

  She pulls me into the girls’ bathroom and points at the mirror. I see my ugly self and twenty girls behind, but no Ella.

  “I thought I was dead at first,” she says. “But I still had to eat and shit, so I figured I was alive.” I stare to make sure she’s real. She is, and I’m hypnotized by her skimpy dress and lean legs. For a second, I wonder what it’d be like to bite them—frail, fragile, like a gaunt strip of quail. She asks me, “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

  “How long’s it been since you’ve seen yourself?”

  “A year?” she shrugs. “I don’t remember how I look anymore.” Her skin is pale and the veins in her neck are vulnerably bulbous, throbbing with platelets and plasma. The excess plasma makes her ponder, “Do you have parts of yourself you hate seeing? I remember when I was a kid, a swarm of bees stung my arm till it was a bloody strip of bumps.”

  “I kill bees whenever I can,” I reply.

  “Why?”

  “Because the taste of honey makes me sick.”

  She asks me eight more questions, but she doesn’t really care for answers, more in love with the questions themselves than her token boy of the moment. We spit through vodka shots; she wants to dance, tells me she picked me as her date for the night. “Impress me,” she says. “Or make me weep.”

  The confused expression on my face makes her laugh and she confesses she used to be a runway model traveling the globe, shuffling through French, Turkish, and Japanese lovers. “I dated a guy with the biggest knife collection in the world.” She twirls her wrist in a slashing motion. “I made sure he was miserable while I was with him.”

  “Why?”

  “I do it to every guy I love. It’s their punishment since I know it can’t last. What’s your passion?”

  “I used to be a chef,” I answer.

  “But?”

  “But I quit after I lost my sense of taste and smell.”

  “You don’t smell anything?”

  I shake my head. “It was the dumbest mistake of my life. I had to try every exotic food, ate something in India that nearly killed me.”

  “There’s no such thing as a mistake. Only discontent after the fact,” she says.

  “I was too greedy,” I reply, feeling dizzy.

  She slaps me in the face, takes me to the bathroom. The mirror rises up like a barricade. Neither of us is reflected. I turn to her, shocked. She laughs and says, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done if you can’t see your reflection.”

  “But I want to see.”

  “Then shatter the glass with your fist.”

  When I hesitate, she smiles. “You never told me a secret.”

  Before I can answer, she turns around. A second later, she’s vanished. I can’t see her anywhere.

  The Death Artist

  I’d come across the troupe after I lost all my money investing in a Beijing-based company that sold weather. They promised thunderstorms and sunshine. Climatology, they were called, like some rock-star inspired cult with pagan deities. People were queuing to be proselytized, and I was one of the first to be chosen, then sacrificed—my hundred thousand dollars became a granule inside a frigate of waste and, after they went bankrupt, I wandered China in a daze. I met a circus act of expats who’d also lost their way. They were performing in a pedestrian underpass. It was Iris with her self-immolation, her ‘Christmas tree of conflagration’ stunt, that made me beg them to recruit me. “Barry here can freeze his whole body. Tammy has pubic hair longer than her legs. What the fuck can you do?”

  “I can die,” I replied.

  They laughed and were about to dismiss me. But Iris stared and asked, “How long?”

  Long enough to live. I wondered those seconds before death—does she feel my desire? Does she know I stare at the way fire meanders across her wrist, the way the oily crevasses reflect in her mastoids and the sharp accents of her clavicles? She reminds me of a charcoal painting with her chaff knuckles and her veins resembling broken pipeworks mired in corpuscles—a symbiotic car crash of mitochondria and guts.

  She talks like an airport intercom messenger. “Paging Milton. Go drown yourself.”

  Iris locks the glass cage. A makeshift audience has gathered. I’m vying for their attention, competing against their cell phones. Water mixed with green tea leaves explodes out like a fusillade. I drown and die; the cage releases the water.

  Resurrected by CPR, I drink 60% proof er gou tou and stumble around camp. I enter Iris’s tent and ask, “When was the last time you made love?”

  She replies, “I need fire to get aroused.”

  “Burn us,” I tell her.

  Her eyes gleam. “A lot of people think they can handle the heat.”

  “Burn us,” I say.

  She sets her arms on fire, her lips curling. Sweat beads on her forehead and it crinkles in delight. She puts a match to my pants. I smell embers like they’re dead hope and I can see the blurry mistakes of my past.

  “You want me to stop?” she asks.

  I shake my head and the fire consumes us, greedy rivets stumbling over one another to get higher. I press my fingers against her bony back, her spine feels like bolts. She shivers and she’s crying from pain. Her tears whet the fire. “You’re insane,” she says.

  The pain is becoming unbearable, the heat a scorching machete ripping my calves open. “Best way to quench passion is to kill it.”

  “Who killed yours?” she asks.

  “My bosses, friends, my ex… you?”

  She sucks in the smoke. “Me.”

  “Let’s kill you then.”

  “How?”

  I grab her hand and run towards the water tank.

  “I’m not like you, I might not come back,” she says.

  “It’s easy. Just swim towards the light.”

  “What light?”

  “The one you see when you blink and your breath stops. Ignore all the voices calling out to you pretending they’re the people you loved.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Death herself,” I answer. We jump in and lock the cage. Water bursts out, quelling the fire. I kiss her and swallow her burnt breast. There’s desperation in our fingers; every sense is acute in our race against the end. She closes her eyes, exhales, bubbles run up her face; I draw the last air from deep in my stomach. The water is cold, but it’s a fiery death.

  58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love

  I.

  Larry Chao was a failure. He’d made fifty-four films and not a single one had been distributed or accepted at the various film festivals. He’d had famous actors star in his movies; his stories were compelling and dramatic. The lighting was impeccable; the sound, epic. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his films except that none of them had been displayed in a public venue. There were a multitude of reasons, all ill fortune rather than any lack of talent on his part. In the two decades that he’d been making films, he’d collected over ten thousand rejections. Which wasn’t too surprising considering that his films tended to alie
nate rather than invite the audiences, the subjects varying across the board, including but not limited to: the epileptic janitor who fell in love with the spurned lover whose head was shot off by her ex-boyfriend; the dormitory of men that woke up one day and discovered they’d all become women; the millionaire who thought he was going to die and spent all his wealth in a day only to find that he’d been misdiagnosed.

  His last film was about a failed suicide artist who fell in love with a failed food artist. Their disappointment connected them together, binding them in a crucifix of contempt and contemplation. His friends had assured him that this was the film that would gain him recognition. Surely the judges couldn’t ignore the brilliance of the piece. But eight months later, the rejections pouring in, he lost hope and instead sang the paean of the middle-aged depression artist who had never savored the dulcet nausea of adulation and acceptance. This time around, his cinematographer refused to return his calls. His actress slapped him in public after he complimented her on her dress. The girl he was dating told him, “I need to date someone with a real job.”

  By some quaint disposition formulated through the combination of erratic genes and environmental anomalies inexplicable in any other setting, it never occurred to him that he might not be that great of a filmmaker. Instead, he felt convinced that his next film would be his magnum opus. His subjects would be 1) 58 random deaths that had no meaning, and 2) unrequited love. The film would be vehement, cruel, and horrifying, while blending in elements of comedy and vaudeville.

  His executive producer asked, “Can’t we just make a normal film for once?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone cheating on their husband or someone addicted to drugs or a superhero-type figure who kills thousands of bad guys… or even better yet, a mid-life crisis kind of story where a guy goes on a road trip and finds happiness in banging some younger girl. People are tired of watching movies about losers. They want to see winners, not people like themselves. If you’ll recall, that’s why they go to the movies. To escape.”

  “My movies are about real people. They don’t get the happy ending because I’ve never gotten a happy ending.”

  “But even your romances end in disaster.”

  “In real life, the guy doesn’t get the girl.”

  “You mean in your life,” he corrected Larry. And it was a fact of some irritation to the producer because Larry wasn’t a very attractive man—short, balding, and chubby. As a result, he hired similarly proportioned actors for his protagonists: never compelling, never dynamic; instead, plain, dull, and normal, making his movies even harder to sell.

  Still, production commenced. There were questions like what type of camera to use, which locations to secure permits and which locations to guerilla-style it. These were the unique travails of indie film productions rife with the exhilaration of dealing with unpredictable caprice that tore apart even the best of planning. It was a twenty-day shoot through rain and sunshine and early mornings and sleepless nights and groggy food marches. The range of deaths was diverse: severed heads, sundered intestines, rent rectums, and spliced spinal cords, the corsage of a conundrum with the punch line of emptiness. It was the dismal conviction of a life that had been unkind to a dreamer.

  On the day of the wrap party, Larry got stuck in traffic. At the exact same time, a fourteen-year-old teenager was assigned the task of shooting a random person as initiation for the gang he wanted to join. He shot Larry five times in the head while humming a catchy pop song. Larry, who’d been humming Billy Joel, didn’t see what was coming and died on the spot.

  The news spread like a wildfire, the conflagration of curiosity razing the public. Larry Chao had shown in his own film the method by which he would die days before he actually did, a ghastly prognostication on the stem of his being. Many viewed it as a condemnation of a society that beautified whimsical violence and sought purpose in perdition. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to see his movie. Motivated by the ardorous obsession of the zealot and the grisly curiosity of the scientist dissecting a live human and noting his death throes as observational bullet points, they waited in interminable lines and slept in front of theaters overnight to catch the matinee. The notoriety of a dog death had garnered him something that had eluded him throughout his breathing life. Interest. 58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love was deemed a masterpiece by the critics. It won most of the major awards at the important film festivals and he was heralded as an auteur unparalleled in scope and vision. When it was revealed that he had archives of unseen films, they were immediately sought out and distributed. All of a sudden, the only name that seemed relevant in film was Larry Chao. Which seemed especially poignant when one considered that the title of the movie that seemed to connote every emotion Chao must have felt being six feet underground as a rotting corpse was his first: Posthumous Fame: What’s the Point of Being Recognized after Death?

  Resistance

  I’m inside an abandoned shopping mall and a hooker’s chasing me with a kitchen knife. It’s 6 a.m. Goddamn Martin for getting me into this shit.

  Would you believe me if I told you he was a nervous wreck around girls? Perpetual stutter, tics skirting across his face, legs shaking like rattles on a rattlesnake. He was the really nice, quiet guy at work, not the guy who was going to start a sex cult and get me killed.

  There was that one late night when he said, “Is any of this shit worth a damn?”

  “Course it is.”

  “We’re testing computerized Playmates so they can lay off card dealers in Vegas,” he said.

  “I don’t mind staring at Playmates all day.”

  He sighed. “We’ve made it too easy to ignore our conscience.”

  Martin’s parents were poor farmers in rural China. They passed away when he was young, so an uncle heading to America agreed to raise him. I met him twenty-three years later at the LA branch of SolTech Industries where we both did quality assurance for whatever new machines they were developing to replace jobs in America.

  He had brown eyes, a pale face, a fastidious bowl cut. We were buddies five years and must have had eighteen different bosses during that time. Every one of them was a schmuck. Some were nicer than others, with nicer meaning better bullshitter.

  Martin and I bitched about girls who rejected us and the cheap pizzas they brought in at work to excuse making us work free overtime. I felt guilty about testing software meant to replace school teachers, and Martin hated the whole ‘digitized friend’ trend that had gripped the States. The concept was simple. Most of our friendships are already digitized: digital calls, emails, links. Just take that to the next level and actualize the digitalization so that lonely manic depressives can pay money for pseudo-friendships.

  It bothered Martin that this corporation preyed on the mentally ill, forming alliances and sponsorships with various psychological associations. “No one gives a shit,” he said, then quit. Though they found his replacement literally five minutes later, everyone at work was stunned. My supervisor summed it up best: “Who quits a job over moral compunctions?”

  I took him out for drinks. As usual, rejections were manifold. Most of these tall, lithe women with short skirts and gazelle legs wouldn’t even look my way. Martin laughed at my ass. “You need to work on your pick up lines.”

  “I think it has more to do with my looks than my delivery… your turn. Go talk to that Chinese girl over there.”

  “Right now?”

  “Dude!”

  Martin approached her, orbiting, hovering. I saw him make a few attempts at conversation but she didn’t hear him over the loud music. Eventually when she did notice, she gave an indifferent glance and walked away with her friends.

  I laughed.

  “Thanks,” he muttered dryly.

  I put my arm around his shoulder and toasted him. “To losers.”

  “Losers.”

  “Where you going to find work?” I asked. “It’s hard as hell to get QA jobs right now.”

  H
e shrugged. “I don’t have to work. I never told you I got a quarterly stipend?”

  “For what?”

  “Donating my blood.”

  “You need more than twenty bucks a month to survive.”

  “What about fifteen thousand every four months?”

  I nearly spat out my beer. “Fifteen thousand bucks to donate your blood?”

  He grinned. “I have a special type.”

  “What kind?”

  “It’s HIV-resistant.”

  If I hadn’t been so drunk, I’d probably remember his explanation better. Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV for short, could destroy your immune system, breaking down all the barriers that kept you safe, increasing apoptosis rates or executing the cells outright. Call it the Genghis Khan of cellular biology: it was fucking ruthless. Martin’s resistance had something to do with cytotoxic T-lymphocytes and immunoglobulin A, a rarity that made him a valuable specimen for biotech companies trying to discover the vaccine for HIV.

  Next morning, I didn’t hear from him. A week passed, a month. He’d vanished. Cell phone disconnected. Apartment abandoned. Email box overloaded.

  The next six months were brutal at work: two rounds of layoffs, me acting like a fucking mendicant, lucky to keep my job, my boss lording it over us like he was a duke. My life was a penitentiary, a prison cell of wanting useless shit and having to please my unpleasable supervisors, who smugly pretended they were on our side. ‘How do you think these layoffs make me feel?’ they loved to ask.

  One night, I got a late phone call. “You been trying to reach me, Walt?”

  “Martin?”

  “Come and visit me.”

  “Where are you?”

  I’d heard about the shanty towns forming outside of major cities throughout America. I headed towards one about two hours east of Los Angeles. The building I was supposed to go to had been a shopping mall until the housing crisis hit and the real estate in the area plummeted 1700%. A booming slice of suburbia became a derelict ghost town, complete with tumbleweed and dusty roads. A musty, putrid smell oozed out of melted concrete and dank wool that had dried. The mall was enormous, faded logos and outlet signs that were falling apart. The parking lot resembled a landfill and my car, being the jalopy it was, blended right in.