Inheriting the War

by Laren McClung

  I don’t know why I am thinking of fire escapes after my uncle’s death. Part of me feels suddenly closer to them, that sense of urgency and danger that fire escapes, in their essence, embody. Maybe this is why the collective fire escape has become so popular. Maybe I prefer such visible desperation to exist outside of my home, out of view, out of mind—but always there. While I go on with my daily life, as I sit with friends in front of the TV, our faces blue-washed, or as I place the birthday cake before my little brother’s delighted face, the candles flickering on the teeth of all the smiling guests, while I make love, while I pray, the fire escape lies just a few feet away, dormant, conveniently hidden—but never completely. I gather my notions of terror and push it out the window, where it calcifies into a structure so utilitarian as to be a direct by-product of fear itself.

  And yet, as I walked through the neighborhoods of New York, there were always at least one or two fire escapes on each street adorned with flowers, tin bird feeders, herb gardens, pink lanterns, bike racks, even cafe-style chairs and tables. I admired and envied this act of domestication. Imagine a pair of hands reaching between those cold black bars and placing a pot of lucent April tulips into the sun. Life touching the possibility of its extinguishment. It almost makes me forget what those black bars were intended for. And maybe that’s for the better. Maybe we live easier decorating danger until it becomes an extension of our homes.

  Ocean, get on.

  I don’t wanna.

  Don’t be a pussy.

  Why does it have to be pink?

  Cuz that’s the cheapest color. Grandma didn’t have enough for a boy bike. Are you getting on or not?

  But you took off the training wheels.

  I know—so we can go faster.

  Okay.

  Come up and sit here, in front . . . can you fit?

  Yeah.

  Ok here we go. Put your feet up. Are you ready soldier?

  Siryesir!

  Here we go. We’re going! We’re heading into enemy territory!

  Ahhhh! . . . .Will they shoot us?

  I don’t know! Hang on! Don’t let go of my arms! Don’t let go ok? Your mom will kill me.

  Don’t worry! I won’t.

  My grandmother gave birth to my uncle, Le Duy Phuong, in 1984 when she was nearly 43 years old. The father is unknown, disappeared into the night after leaving a tin of jasmine tea and a few crumpled bills on my grandmother’s nightstand, Ho Chi Minh’s benevolent-rendered face gazing out of the creased currency. Three years after my uncle’s birth, I would come into the world at the height of Vietnam’s post-war reconstruction era. Food was scarce. Many families, including ours, were cutting their rice rations with sawdust. But we would survive, my uncle and I—growing up together, playing together and, eventually, immigrating to America together. I was his shadow in those early days, often accompanying him even into the bathroom, where we would continue our conversations and games as he sat on the toilet. Because even the door, as thin as it was, was for me an unbearable border. A week before his death, we would share one last conversation with each other.

  I was in Hartford for the holidays, and we decided to catch up, as we always do when I’m home, over coffee. We drove to a nearby Barnes & Noble and sat in the cafe. Beneath the bright lights I could tell he looked distraught, gaunt, his eyes dark at the edges. I can only manage to eat an apple and drink a bit of water these days, he said. He was “tired of this world” he explained, albeit cryptically. He kept distressing about his failed relationships, his bills, his job at the nail salon. Despite being fluent in English and a high-school graduate, customers often assumed, perhaps because of his quiet demeanor, that he was a new immigrant, often speaking about him amongst each other as if he couldn’t understand. Why would he waste his time in college? It’s better to keep doing manicures. He has such strong hands for an Asian. I tried comforting him, fumbling with a quote from James Baldwin but abandoned it mid-sentence when I saw his distant, sunken gaze, as if he was watching a field burning behind me. I reached out to touch his elbow. Hey . . . Hey, what’s wrong? He kept staring at the field.

  [ . . . ] The thinking

  Of you where you are a blank

  To be filled

  —Mary Jo Bang

  When someone dies their silence becomes a sort of held note, a key on the piano pressed down for so long it becomes an ache in the ear, a new sonic register from which we start to measure our new, ruptured lives. A white noise. Maybe this is why there is so much music in dying: the funerals, the singing, the hymns, the eulogies. All those sounds crowding the air with what the dead can’t say.

  There is the sound of hard drumming now: a wooden mallet knocking against a wooden bowl, a small sharp gong pounded at a rate equal to the heart. A monk in a mustard-colored robe, accompanied by her two white-haired assistants, opens a page of scripture and chants along to the dissonant instruments thrumming through my uncle’s tiny apartment. Everyone’s here. My mother, my aunts, cousins, my uncle’s friends and co-workers. About 20 people crammed into the living room. The couches and various furniture pushed flush against the walls, or stacked on top of one another. We are all kneeling before the makeshift altar. It’s been 7 days. A soft, silken mound of ash from hundreds of incense sticks has accumulated in front of my uncle’s photo. More food. Plates of rice and vegetables. More incense. More chanting. We bow when the monk directs us to. We bow in unison, the items of my uncle’s life still scattered all about us: socks, single shoes, green packs of Wrigley’s gum, cigarettes, DVDs fallen from their cases, receipts, bars of chocolate, Levi’s, dress shirts, underwear—much of it disheveled by us, the mourners, trying to make room for ourselves in an empty house. With my finger coiled around the wire of my uncle’s Xbox video game console, I lower my head and listen to the sounds of the Lotus Sutra, my favorite. Its deep droning rising from our collective despair. I let it enter me: a warm constant vibration crowding out that silent note on the piano of the dead. I close my eyes.

  In Buddhism, it is believed that when one dies a tragic, emotional, or sudden death, the spirit might not realize it has died at all—and so it’s imperative to remind that person of their present, bodiless state. It is also believed that when the body perishes, one’s hearing ability is heightened, since the spirit becomes more air-like and can therefore hear with its entire being. The monk encourages us to speak to my uncle. My mother, who has been kneeling beside me, now stands, her hands look like knotted roots. Little brother, her voice quickly cracks into a sort of wail, please listen to big sister. I know you are scared but you must be brave and leave this place. There is nothing left here. Through her tears and strained voice, the Vietnamese language, a language so dependent on subtle inflections and intonations, now sounds otherworldly, warping in her throat from low guttural groans to high, fluctuating whines. Please don’t stay in this house, little brother. Soon, people will move in and you won’t recognize them. Sister will come see you every week at the temple. Sister loves you. Please go and find a way to your next birth. I will see you again in another life. She looks around the room, as if trying to locate him. My hands are numb. I take the hood from my sweatshirt and cover my head, shadowing my face.

  We finally start to leave in single file, the monk leading the way, still chanting, her assistants knocking on their instruments. They will head into a van and drive the 35 minutes to the temple where my uncle’s urn will be laid to rest. It will be kept inside a cupboard with other urns until they can be scattered into the Connecticut river on an auspicious day in the Buddhist calendar. I stand behind the procession and am the last to leave. I blow out the candles, snuff the remaining incense and hurry out, not looking back. I tear off the scrap of police tape fluttering on the mail box and close the door.

  Ocean, get on.

  I don’t wanna.

  Don’t be a pussy.

  Why does it have to be pink?

  Cuz that’s the cheapest color. Grandma didn’t have enough after groceries for a
boy bike. Are you getting on or not?

  But you took off the training wheels.

  I know—so we can go faster.

  Okay.

  Come up and sit here, in front . . . can you fit?

  Yeah . . . How come we’re not moving?

  We can’t. We’re not supposed to go yet.

  What do you mean?

  . . . .

  Uncle?

  You didn’t save me. You were supposed to save me.

  But how—

  Where is my face? Who took my face? There’s just a black hole now.

  Uncle, please.

  It’s like God’s thumbprint. Right on my face. Here—put your hand to it . . . it feels like sand.

  My arms swing wildly through the dark. As if the dark was something to be torn away. The room suddenly a cage. Everything smaller, everything pressed against my skin. My arms and legs tangled in a web of blankets and sheets, knocking into bedposts, a night stand, chairs, cups of water, clocks, phone cords. I’m on the hardwood. Bare-chested. Wet. Cold. Shuddering. My hands covering my face, fearing he is still there, staring down at me from his pink bicycle—a black oval in his face, sucking in all the light. I look through a crack between my fingers. I see the violet window, a few dull stars over Queens, New York. I get up, walk toward it and press my forehead to the pane. I look out into the quiet, blue-lit city, my face vanishing in the reflection as the glass steams beneath my breath, softening the orange light that has just come on in an apartment across the courtyard. The sky starting to recede into the grainy grey of another morning. There should be tears.

  It’s winter in New York. It’s January 8, 2014. It’s been a year. The temperature has been dipping lately and today has plunged to a debilitating 4 degrees. Too cold for a walk. I stand at my window and look across the courtyard. It’s been foggy all morning; the milky whiteness descending so low one of the buildings across the way has vanished completely, leaving only its fire escape—suspended in the air. Like the black bones of some mythical creature fossilized on its way to touch the sky.

  I wonder what would happen if I were to bring the fire escape back inside. In fact, what would the fire escape look like if I were to wear it on my person, personality—in public? What would a fire escape sound like if it was imbedded into my daily language—and not have to apologize for it? Could this be one reason we create art—one reason we make poems? To say the unsayable? I don’t know—but I’d like to think so. After all, the poem never needs to clear its throat or talk of the weather or explain why it’s here, what it’s looking for. It doesn’t even need its creator to speak. Its importance springs from its willingness to exist outside of practical speech. It possesses no capital yet still insists on being worthy. I come to the poem and it offers me immediate communication with someone’s secret self, self-preserved from the mainstream and its hunger for order through emotional sterilization. “Why, as poets,” says Carl Phillips, “[should we] strip and, thereby make visible, difficulty instead of satisfying the majority of people by veiling it? Because poetry is not only what reminds us that we are human, but helps ensure that we don’t forget what it means to be so.” In this way, the poem is more than paper and words, more than the obscure fiddlings of the high-brow, it is an invitation to a more private, necessary dialogue. I approach it as if climbing the rungs of someone’s fire escape—whether I go up or down—is between me, the reader, and the poet. And maybe nothing is burning at all. Maybe we are only up here for the view. But it’s up here that I wonder, at the risk of asking for too much, what if a fire escape can be made into a bridge?

  Ocean, what do you think you want to be when you grow up?

  I want to be a car.

  What?! You can’t be a car, you have to be a human.

  Ok. I want to be you. You go fast. Like a car.

  Boston. July 22, 1975. A large tenement fire breaks out on Marlborough Street. Standing on the building’s fifth floor fire escape, awaiting the fire truck’s rescue ladders, is 19-year-old Diana Bryant and her 2-year-old daughter, Tiare Jones. Before the ladders could reach them, the fire escape collapses. At this moment, Stanley Forman, a photojournalist covering Boston fires, raises his camera from the street, and captures the mother and daughter mid-fall. Bryant would die from her injuries—while Jones, having fallen on top of her mother’s body, would survive. Forman’s photo would go on to win the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for best News Photography and the title of World Press Photo of the Year.

  In the photo, Bryant is seen falling headfirst. Her daughter, upright, is behind her. Their limbs akimbo and blurred from the pull of gravity. There are potted plants falling alongside them. The iron shards of the collapsed fire escape can be seen hanging jaggedly from the building. It is a photograph of wrenching urgency and terror, one that shows a woman the moment before her death. And I wonder whether the fascination is of death alone—or could it also be the failure of a device meant to prevent death. That one can indeed, escape the fire, and still perish through the means of that escape. That our last notion of safety, the plan-B, the just-in-case, has literally fallen apart when we need it most. The picture makes palpable, in a way, what we can’t always say to one another without the risk of “dampening the mood”: I am vulnerable even when I should be safe.

  I think of the plotted plants. I think of Diana placing the green lives into fresh soil and putting them out on her fire escape. How happy she must have felt to make her own space a little more beautiful. How I, too, do what I can to make things a little more beautiful—(bearable?). I think of the difficulty of talking about collapse in person, face to face. I think of my uncle in the cafe. How blurred he must have felt—free falling like that and not being able to say it. How did we come to live in a culture in which it’s taboo to speak of the unpleasant? Let’s talk about something else, we say, something cheerful. Let’s save this for later, we say, Please, not now, not at the dinner table.

  The limits of my language mean the limits of my world, says Wittgenstein. And if we continue to censor my most vital dialogues, our world can only grow smaller. And here, the poem does not necessitate admittance to anyone’s dinner table. It speaks to whomever chooses to listen, whom ever needs it. But mostly, it avoids the easy answers, the limited and stunted, convenient closures. And maybe all a poem can really do is remind us that we are not alone—in our feelings. And maybe that’s nothing. And maybe that’s more than enough. Still, there’s no way of knowing if an engagement with poetry would have saved my uncle’s life. Perhaps. And perhaps not. But I wish I could’ve found a way to share it with him more often, to have the courage to communicate on that urgent and open bandwidth. That we could trust each other with our frailties knowing that, as humans, we are, at our best, partially broken. I was never able to explain to him what I really do—with poems and words. My family calls me a scholar because scholars are revered in Vietnam. Having lost so much, they wanted, desperately, for something to be proud of. How can I tell them that I spend hours, months, writing poems very few people will read—and with barely any money to show for it? I hesitate to elucidate on my writing, fearing I would taint any esteemed image they have of me in the process. Other families sacrifice everything for lawyers! my uncle would say at family gatherings, a Heineken in his hand and his face flushed with delight, But we, we did it for a scholar. We might be poor but we’ll live forever in books!

  There is another world

  but it is inside this one.

  —Eluard

  I speak of poetry only because it is the medium that I am most intimate with. But what I mean to say is that all art, if willing, can create the space for our most necessary communications. The character in the novel, the brush strokes in the painting, its tactile urgency, the statue of the Madonna made from birdseed, partly devoured and narrowed into a yellowed sliver in the rain. I want to believe there are things we can say without language. And I think this is the space the fire escape occupies, a space unbounded by genre or the physical limitations of the ar
tist’s tools. A space of pure potential, of possibility, where our desires, our strange and myriad ecstasies can, however brief, remain amorphous and resist the decay actualized by the rational world.

  And yet, in a time where the mainstream seems to continually question the power and validity of art, and especially of poetry, its need, its purpose, in a generation obsessed with appearances, of status updates and smiling selfies bathed (corrected?) in the golden light of filters, in which it has become more and more difficult for us to say aloud, to one another: I am hurt. I am scared. What happens now? the poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to—because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions—and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often. That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live.

  ZACHARY WATTERSON ’s stepfather, Ronald Sitts, served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy, was attached to the USS Intrepid in 1967, and piloted helicopters on rescue missions over the Gulf of Tonkin. Watterson’s short stories and essays appear in The Massachusetts Review, The Stranger, Post Road, River Styx, and Commentary. His work has received several awards, including a Pushcart Prize nomination.