Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  “Calm down, okay?” I say. “It’s your porno.”

  Maly places her hand on her hips and strikes a pose, shooting me an exasperated look, and then sits down.

  The porn actors are now fucking more aggressively, and I expect Maly to start heckling them, to crack a joke about the guy’s grunting or the woman’s moaning. I want her to make a comment that confirms the insanity of this situation. Anything that would align us together as observers of the world, of everyone else but us, outsiders who can see through the bullshit; but instead, she just goes sullen. Lost in thought, she studies the porno. So we sit in silence as the scene nears its climax, as the male actor pulls out of the female actor, as he masturbates vigorously and she writhes in ecstasy, her vagina almost calling out to his penis to unload itself. And unload it sure does, all over her inner thighs, so much so that Maly, jumping from her seat, seems to be exploding herself with some newfound motivation.

  “I need to see this baby,” Maly says, darting to the door.

  Cleaning up so I can run after her, I stop the film and struggle to find the DVD case. Then, before I hit the eject button, the frozen image compels me to pause, and sit there, dumbfounded, stoned. I am entranced by the cum covering the woman’s bottom half, though not the vagina itself, and, despite my own preferences, this reminds me of failure, somehow. Failure in its most legit form.

  BY THE TIME I CATCH UP with her, Maly’s jumping the fence of our second cousin’s duplex. Maybe our second cousin wouldn’t mind that we’re sneaking into her house, but I’m too high and paranoid to deal, and apparently Maly doesn’t care about anyone’s privacy or taking the extra steps to ask for permission. Anyway, it’s too late to calm her down, convince her this may be unwise—breaking into the nursery of a baby who happens to be her dead mother—so I follow her nervously through the back door.

  Our second cousin’s napping on the couch, and I fight the urge to yell for Maly to abort her mission, to grab her by the shoulders and remind her that none of this matters, that we shouldn’t partake in the stupid delusions of old people wishing their lives had gone another way, that we have each other, just as we always have, even if we’re about to be separated by three hundred miles, a whole mountain range. Fuck everyone else, I want to say, for burdening the two of us with all their baggage. Let’s go back to minding our own business, anything but this. Who cares about our family? What have they ever done but keep us alive only to make us feel like shit?

  We find the baby’s room without any mishaps, other than my growing sense of unease about following Maly down this fucked-up rabbit hole of hers. Once inside the bedroom, Maly cautiously approaches the sleeping baby. She shakes her head and clutches the rails of the crib. She looms over this tiny and new body of the mother she grew up without.

  “It’s uglier than I thought it would be,” Maly says.

  “What did you expect?” I ask from behind her, wondering what she is seeing in the baby’s face, whether she recognizes a flicker of her mother’s soul, or nothing at all.

  “I . . .” She shakes her head again, but quickly this time. “Who do you think my kid will be?”

  “You actually believe this?”

  “I mean, hypothetically. What if it’s Ma Eng? You know, after she dies.”

  “Now that would be serious karma.”

  “Shit, that’d fucking suck,” Maly says. “I have zero interest in facilitating the rebirth of Ma Eng. She’ll pop from my vagina reeking of tiger balm, pinching my ears ’cause she’s, like . . . already disappointed in me. No way I’m unleashing Ma Eng onto the world all over again.”

  We laugh until we don’t, and endure a silence together, with her back still turned to me.

  Finally: “I’d totally have an abortion if I knew—like really knew—that Ma Eng was gestating inside of me.”

  “Even as a dead embryo, or even reincarnated, she’d haunt the fuck out of you.”

  “Probs,” Maly responds, glancing at me from a slant. It’s almost like she can’t move away from the baby, like something’s forcing her to confront it. “Ves . . . is it weird I want my mom reborn as . . . my child?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answer. Because what else can I say?

  Watching as she redirects her gaze, as she lowers her hand into the crib, I can’t help but imagine Maly hurting the baby. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but I worry she’s about to do something terrible, even as she caresses its head, delicately, with the gentlest touch of her fingers.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Maly says. “She’s actually pretty cute.”

  And this, out of everything, is what chokes me up. The air suddenly stuffy, I feel the cramped dimensions of the room, the dry roof of my mouth, all the words trying to claw their way out of my throat. Fuck, I now think, teary-eyed, trespassing not in our second cousin’s house but in Maly’s world, her one opportunity of peace with this baby. Of course Maly would want to be with her mom, no matter how. Of course she never needed me, not really. Maybe I was the one who was angry, with Maly’s mom, with everyone, this entire time. Just me.

  Right then, Ma Eng opens the door, presumably to collect our second cousin’s baby for the party. Her eyebrows collide. She’s surprised to see us, but she only tells us to hurry up, that the food is ready, the monks are at her house, and then orders us to bring the baby. So Maly swoops it up and turns around. Standing before me, her reincarnated mom pressed against her body like armor, Maly looks natural, as if she’s been preparing to hold this baby her whole life, her cocky anarchy so easily swept away.

  “Let’s go,” she whispers, following Ma Eng.

  It takes me a second to realize Maly is talking to the baby, and I find myself overwhelmed by the quiet of the nursery. For a moment, I am the only person in the neighborhood separate from the celebration, from the grandparents and the parents, including my own, and the babies. From all the generations, old and new, dead and alive, or even reborn. Staying here, in Maly’s wake, I understand how truly alone I am.

  THIS NIGHT—after the monks bless Maly’s reincarnated mom, after everyone toasts the baby and feasts on food the baby can’t even eat, after our drunken uncles sing too many karaoke songs, and after Rithy whisks Maly away, for only an hour, to bring her back with nothing but hickeys—I dream I’m in the Videodrome. Around me towers of TVs broadcast the programs meant to brainwash our minds, the conspiracies of our time on every channel, including Maly’s lives playing in tandem on hundreds of screens. In every single one, she’s a different girl, with different caretakers who express their affection in odd ways, who sacrifice too much to raise her, who abandon her for various reasons. Self-loathing scumbags and narcissistic good guys and corrupt role models of all genders float in and out of her lives, hurting her most of the time, but others, when she’s lucky, they push her into something like happiness. Regardless, she eventually has kids, sometimes many, sometimes only one, all of them growing up with forms of entitlement she never understands, all of them loved by her, fiercely, no matter what. And still, every iteration of Maly’s life, despite any trace of rebellion, any nitty-gritty details, they all map out to a similar pattern, follow the same arc into the very same ending.

  Surrounded by visions of Maly, I regret that I won’t remember each of her lives, but I will keep this: standing here in the Videodrome, watching my cousin grow into the same mother across all her reincarnated selves, as I wonder about my kteuy-ness, how it fits into the equation before me, and doesn’t.

  Then I wake up. I rise out of my twin bed, look around my room, the sunlight from the window exposing the floating dust, like the phantom beam of a projector. And finally, I start packing.

  The Shop

  Dealing with customers, I usually called Dad the owner, or the main smog technician if we needed to sound legit, but as a kid, I had always considered him just another Cambodian mechanic—a stereotype, one who’d pinched enough pennies to open his own car repair shop. The summer after college, I felt like a real dumbass for havi
ng thought so little of Dad, but in my defense, that was what Cambo men did. They fixed cars, sold donuts, or got on welfare.

  At least according to Doctor Heng’s wife, who always, whether her car needed repairs or not, nosed her way into the waiting room of the Shop. Back in our refugee days, when Cambos had just come to California, only her husband had stayed in school long enough to do something legitimate with his life, like become a doctor. She spoke about her husband’s virtues a ton at the Shop, especially after I’d graduated, failed to get a job with my symbolic systems degree—a concentration meant for coders not smart enough for the hardcore stuff—and moved back to the Central Valley from the Midwest. Her hair done up into a misshapen lump, makeup a shade too light, Doctor Heng’s wife would materialize out of nowhere, swinging the sleeves of yet another floral silk blouse, then plop herself in front of the air conditioner and say things like, “My husband, Doctor Heng, he never looks up a thing when he diagnoses a patient. He is so much smarter than other men. He remembers everything.”

  One day, when I’d just started working at the Shop again, Doctor Heng’s wife went on a tirade about how lazy guys were in my generation. “What is wrong with you boys!” she was saying. “Not one Cambodian man since my husband, Doctor Heng, has become a doctor here in America, not even those born with citizenship! My generation came here with nothing. We escaped the Communists. So what are boys like you doing?!”

  I was busy handling a customer who was getting impatient about his car. “Let me consult the main smog technician,” I said to him, trying my best to communicate through my expression that Doctor Heng’s wife was harmless, despite her tone, and despite her aggressive hair.

  After the customer went outside to take a phone call, Doctor Heng’s wife approached the counter and then whacked me on the head with a rolled-up magazine. “Why did you not become a doctor?”

  She tried whacking me again, but I stepped out of her reach. “Ming, please stop,” I said. “Violence will not solve our problems, and neither will the model minority myth.”

  “Useless big words,” she scoffed. “That is all you learned going to college.” I laughed. It was hard to argue with her.

  No one knew why Doctor Heng’s wife came around so much, not even Mom and her gossipy friends, but her daily visits had been happening since Dad first opened the Shop. They happened when I was twelve and Brian and I took turns depositing checks at the bank across the street, which dumbasses tried robbing so often it was later replaced by a Church’s Chicken. They happened when I was seventeen and studying for the SATs while customers muttered passive-aggressive things to Dad for raising his prices. And they happened when I started hanging around the Shop again, not because Dad paid me—why would I get paid when Dad was already supporting me?—but simply because I had nothing better to do.

  Brian thought that Doctor Heng’s wife, in her younger days, must have fallen in love with Dad, only to lose all hope after he had proposed to Mom within an instant of their meeting. Following this logic, stopping by the Shop was simply Doctor Heng’s wife rubbing it in our faces that her life had turned out amazing, so much better than she had ever imagined when dreaming about Dad—with her Lexus and Omega watches and Louis Vuitton bags smelling of fresh leather, all of them so giant I swore they had gained consciousness and could swallow me whole, were I to transgress their master.

  Who knows? Maybe Brian was right. Though Dad couldn’t have cared less. He barely acknowledged Doctor Heng’s wife half the time, nor anyone else who wasn’t a customer. Most of his day he spent fixing the mistakes his guys made—a transmission misdiagnosed, an alignment over-rotated, a customer’s car interior smudged with oil because one of the guys had forgotten to lay on the seat a clean protector sheet. Dad was a real softie for his fellow Cambo men. He had hired as many friends as he could, way more than the Shop could actually afford, and let them get away with anything. It was a beautiful enterprise, no matter how flawed, the way Dad sustained so many people, a whole ecosystem, both in terms of providing a service to the neighborhood and also providing twelve Cambo men with jobs. He even paid some of them under the table so they could qualify for welfare, but only the guys with kids. Dad’s epic tolerance for his guys was actually how we got in trouble in the first place. I mean, how we got in trouble when I worked at the Shop full-time, as an adult of sorts. By no means was this the first time the Shop had been in deep shit.

  Anyway, at the end of July, Ohm Young left the keys in the ignition of a customer’s truck after test-driving its repairs. He’d parked the truck in the strip mall beside to the Shop, where we left the cars that were all done, right in front of the tiny hair salon that also functioned as a massage parlor and full-service mani-pedi spa, not to forget that it was the only decent joint to buy coconut rice wrapped in banana leaves. By the next morning the truck had disappeared. Technically, Ohm Young worked as the assistant manager, though he never really did that much assistant managing.

  “Ahhhh, sorry boss,” Ohm Young said. “I do not know what happened.” He shrugged, and Dad was shocked into a stupid awe as he tried processing his assistant manager’s feat of nonchalance.

  “What do you mean you do not know what happened?” cried Doctor Heng’s wife, who was present, of course, to witness their exchange. “You lost a car! Not a piece of car. An entire car!”

  “All right, all right, it is going to be okay,” Dad said, reassuring everyone in the waiting room, except himself, because he looked a tad bit nauseated, too pale to register as okay. “Toby, go look for the car,” he said to me then. “Please, oun, just do it.”

  It was a near-impossible task, contingent on the idea, I imagined, that some drunken homeless man had stumbled into the truck and taken it for a joyride around the block. Which, in fact, had happened once, years before. The homeless man was named Ace, and he returned the car himself, walking right up to the counter and handing Dad the keys like the Shop was a rental company. A younger version of myself would’ve resisted Dad’s request—how many good-natured Aces did he think existed in the world?—but I couldn’t hold it against him for wanting to try, for hanging on to a shred of hope that everything might turn out fine, that the worst parts of his life were over, so nothing happening now could be that bad.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” I said, and he forced a smile, tried his best to seem optimistic. Dad was one of those guys who smiled and laughed constantly, but never without a sad look in his eyes. I’d realized this about him shortly after graduating. One of Dad’s other guys, Ohm Luo, a smog technician who didn’t do much smog checking, had cracked a joke about always finding himself in oppressive regimes—first under Pol Pot, then under his wife, and now Ohm Young had driven their whole neighborhood mad practicing the electric keyboard during block parties—which made Dad laugh and laugh, and when he stopped laughing, and his eyes caught mine, I saw it, that look of faint, enduring grief.

  Realizations I should have had as a kid were, I guess, what kept me mopping the floors of the Shop. Really, I needed to apply for jobs in the Bay Area, jobs with equity and benefits, not just free lunches with Dad and his fake best friend, Ohm Sothuy, who owned a rival car repair shop on the other side of the Costco. I knew I was supposed to find a legitimate job, but at this point in my life, dumb epiphanies about home seemed so precious, urgent, fleeting.

  “I will come, too,” Doctor Heng’s wife said to Dad, clutching her Louis Vuitton bag as if prepared for battle. “I need to talk to this guy over here, anyway,” she added, gesturing toward me.

  Doctor Heng’s wife and I climbed into my Honda Accord, which was twenty years old but would never die, no matter how much it wanted to, as Dad kept fixing our cars to run forever. There was a comfort to driving this car, which had been passed from Mom to Brian and then back to Mom and finally to me, but it did have subpar air-conditioning.

  “My hot flashes are bad, bad, bad,” Doctor Heng’s wife said, fanning herself with my expired registration sheet. “When you marry a girl, make sure her mother
is not having a bad menopause. It is genetic, you know. Everything is genetic. Everything gets handed down.”

  “I’m gay,” I told her, turning onto Swain Road, one of the residential streets by the Shop. I drove as slowly as possible so we could check the cars parked on the street. “We’re looking for a 2005 Toyota Tundra truck,” I added. “It’s like a muddy gold.”

  “Yes, I know,” she responded, though she for sure hadn’t known. She was now fanning herself with a Louis Vuitton wallet that matched her Louis Vuitton bag. “You can still marry a girl,” she said, and I half expected her to start speculating about the genetics of gayness in my bloodline.

  “I am well aware of that,” I said, “the fact that I am allowed, legally, to marry a woman.”

  Then Doctor Heng’s wife pinched my cheek and jumped into a monologue: “Stupid! Listen to me. I am being serious, like I am always being. I do not joke, and do not assume anything I say is a joking matter. I only have the best and smartest intentions for you and everyone your age. Why are boys so dense? Gay boys should be less dense than other boys, no? So how come you are not? Marry a girl because that is what you should do. I am not saying you cannot be gay. How hard is it to be normal and gay? This is the plan. You will marry a girl from Cambodia, a nice girl, a girl from a good family, a rich family, a princess from a rich family, and her parents will pay you fifty thousand, fifty thousand at least, to marry their daughter and get her a green card, and you and this girl will have children, because that is what you should do, have children. And after five years, when the girl succeeds the citizenship test, you can divorce her and get joint custody of the children. Then you will invest your fifty thousand in the stock market. Your life will be established. You can be as gay as you want after your life is established. That is the plan.”