Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  After the Shop had been suffused with a light haze, Doctor Heng’s wife spread a few woven mats over the garage floor, then aggressively gestured at Dad, his guys, and me. “Get down!” she shouted through her teeth, as if ten minutes had already passed since her gesturing. “You cannot put yourselves in a position above the monks. They need to sit! What are you doing just standing around?”

  We fell to our knees, and the monks followed, sitting down in the center of the mats. They proceeded to chant in low, hushed voices, ones I’d heard since I was a kid but had never bothered to understand. We watched them pray, our hands clasped together again. Fifteen minutes of nonstop droning passed, and maybe I experienced this simply from my numbing thighs and butt cheeks, but the smoke from the incense felt asphyxiating, jammed into my pores and blasted into my nostrils, like it was clogging the very space between my cells. A headache cleaved through my brain, and I remembered the first time Dad had been serious with me about the genocide.

  I was ten years old, barely into the double digits, and it was Cambodian New Year. Some older kids had fixated on my shoes or something. Behind the wat and next to the field, where the pop-up stalls were releasing clouds of barbecuing smoke, they pushed me against the rusty chain-link fence. They interrogated me about whether I had Communists for relatives. “Your Gong probably killed people, you faggot,” their leader said. “Probably sucked Pol Pot’s dick.” I didn’t fully understand his taunting, but I was still upset, and when I ran back to Dad, sobbing and heaving, he denied any Communist connections to our bloodline but confirmed our history—how half of everyone’s relatives had died.

  “It was a thing that was done to us, that’s all,” he said, wiping my tears away. “You better get all this crying out now,” he also said. “No use in crying when it already happened.” Then he lifted me onto his shoulders, even though I’d grown too big for that, before walking us both inside the wat. A crowd had gathered in front of the monks. We joined them and prayed, for good karma and luck and blessings, for the upcoming year and our future reincarnated lives, and I slipped into a total hopelessness. What had we done to deserve such violence? How terrible it must have been, our country and culture’s past karma.

  These concerns came rushing back to me as I kneeled on the Shop’s oily floor, on the same style of woven mats from that fateful Cambodian New Year. I felt a gloom only deepened by the thrumming of unintelligible chanting. I couldn’t bear watching Dad resort to these half-broken beliefs.

  So I thought about Paul. He was a decent guy with a decent job, someone I liked enough to bring into my real, established life, the one I hadn’t even started to build. And he would become even more decent, if he had come out, and stopped lying to his girlfriend. I could take a chance on Paul, I thought. I could settle down and commit to working with Dad. I could be the second dutiful and mature son my parents would rely on for support. I didn’t know what I had to offer, really, other than cleaning as the Shop’s janitor and transcribing music for Ohm Young. Even so, the prospect of my moving away, for yet another time, struck me as incredibly selfish.

  “Ba,” I whispered, and he either didn’t hear or was ignoring me. Regardless, I kept muttering, “Ba . . . Ba . . . Ba.”

  “You need to be focusing,” Dad answered, though I had no clear idea of what I needed to focus on.

  “Ba, don’t worry,” I continued, my legs shaking from the numbness. “I’m gonna help you. I don’t know how, but I’m gonna help the Shop.”

  “Oun,” Dad said gruffly, “can you just be worrying about yourself?” He sighed and angled his face at me. “The Shop is providing for you, that’s why we have the Shop.”

  And it hit me—once more that look of grief. But this time no one spared me its full force. The past year flashed across my eyes. The days I’d spent at the Shop doing nothing, my inability to apply for legitimate jobs. What had everyone thought of me, I wondered, of Dad? His son jobless, a college degree going to waste. I began to realize the extent I had been a complete child, one that was chaining my father down to a failing business. Dad’s attention returned to the monks all trying to fix the Shop, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe myself.

  Then Paul came to my thoughts again, how we were supposed to hang out that night. What I’d just envisioned, committing to a life here, it appeared so stupid, even as the sentiment retained a sort of comfort. I took my phone out of my pocket, secretly checking my notifications as it lay on the ground. Several texts from Paul were popping up, but before I could open any of them, the monks stopped chanting and everyone stopped praying.

  Doctor Heng’s wife placed empty bowls in front of the monks, and then handed the rest of us, the representatives of the Shop, our own bowls she had filled with warm rice. Still crouched on our knees, we formed a line. We shuffled in a procession, crawling on the mats, scooping rice into the bowls of each of the monks. When the ritual was done, the monks started eating their feast, and I stood next to the waiting room’s door, one hand stuffed into my pocket, the other gripping my phone. With my motivation to read my texts waning, I took in the garage of the Shop. It felt smaller now. Machines that had once seemed gigantic only reached my shoulders.

  Listening from outside the waiting room, I heard Doctor Heng’s wife talking to Dad, so I peeked through the doorway. “Bong, you need to make a donation,” she was saying at the counter. “Write the check before the monks get full. Do it quickly, Bong.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Dad said, as though chanting his own kind of prayer, and as he wrote out the check, I found myself trying to understand the creases of his disgruntled, defeated brow. They were spelling something out for me, some dispatch sent from across the universe, by the accumulation of our reincarnated lives, from every different past we’d ever experienced. “If this day is harnessing as much karma as possible,” his wrinkles read, “more spiritual power than this community has ever seen, maybe the Shop will have good business. And when that happens, hopefully, fingers crossed, we will soon break even from the cost of our donation.”

  As I stood between the waiting room and the garage, I watched Dad finish signing the check. Watched him hand that flimsy paper to Doctor Heng’s wife, who stuffed it into her giant purse. All that money, probably a whole month’s earnings, was now swimming among loose pocket change, and I stopped caring about those texts from Paul, the smallness of the Shop, the monks stuffing their mouths with Mom’s egg rolls. Nothing behind me seemed to matter. Everything receded into the smoky blur of the incense, the shadows of all those Buddhas.

  I wished for only one thing—to send a response to Dad’s message, etched onto my own forehead, a beacon I’d shoot out into the ether. “But what,” I was ready to ask, for every life Dad and I had lived and lost, “will we do after?”

  The Monks

  Two days at the wat and all I’ve done is count shit. The dots on the ceiling. How long it takes for a stick of incense to crumble into ashes. The number of steps to the kitchen, where the grandmas are always talking smack about everyone, even about each other to their own faces. What goes down at the temple was supposed to be more spiritual, and eye-opening, and informative, like how preachers in the movies holler out prayers. How they push regular guys to see themselves differently. Instead, I count the white stitches on my orange robes. Then the stitches on the robes of the monks praying next to me.

  My crew would bust my balls if they found out my temple life consists of counting. And if they found out I sleep in a tiny, funky-smelling room. It’s not a bad funky, but more like a couple-banged-in-a-pile-of-ash funky. We told you the wat’s hella fake, my boys would say. Sad dopes with no jobs, no place to live, they become monks. And Maly, she’d be pissed. She didn’t want me to shave my head for the bon, told me I looked like an aborted alien fetus after the initial ceremonies, before I came to the temple to ensure Dad’s spirit, or whatever he is now, passes gently into its next life. “Come back when your scalp stops feeling like a giant dick,” she said, kicking me off her
bed. “I can’t believe you’re wasting a week on that sick fuck you called a dad,” she also said.

  After Dad’s funeral was the last time I got off. Just a quickie with Maly, who wouldn’t kiss me because of my bald head. I still appreciated her. Nothing since then, not even a good bate session. Counting relaxes me though. It’s something to pass the time. If I could, I would count how many hours I’ve been alive, or seconds, or how much longer I have until I’m shipped off to basic combat training, but I don’t have the patience for all that. I’m not a whiz kid. I’m not living a Cambo version of Stand and Deliver. I fucked up my classes, and none of my teachers cared enough to warn me. They were too busy putting on Stand and Deliver so they could avoid teaching the real stuff.

  Maybe if I score a calculator from the Cha’s office, I can take my counting to the next level. But he would just tell me to chill. He’d rant about the universe being like this and how karma being like that, and before I know it, I’d be scrubbing off the silly string that’s been stuck to the pavement since last Cambodian New Year. It’s all for that nirvana, he’d say, laughing his ass off from the porch. Boy, you better build up your karma if you’re going off to war, he’d say.

  BEFORE LUNCH

  Push-ups, 45 (5 more than Pou does in the morning)

  Sit-ups, 60 (10 more than Pou does in the morning)

  Times I thought about Maly’s body, lost count, maybe the whole time?

  The other day, when I first got here, the Cha handed me a notepad. We stood in the center of the big prayer room, and the giant and fake-gold Buddha stared us down from the stage. I swear the stage has been overdue for a collapse since I was in middle school. Khmer music played in the background. Being there without a crowd of kneeling grandparents, I felt strange, and naked. I imagined a sea of old Cambos surrounding us, their wrinkly heads bobbing up and down to pray. “Am I supposed to write Buddhist stuff in here?” I asked.

  “You write your feelings down, Rithy,” the Cha said roughly. His white polo drowned him in shirt. I could tell the polo was a knockoff because the horse logo was twice the size it should’ve been. It was also placed exactly where a guy’s right nipple goes. “I saw it on TV,” the Cha added. “This talk show lady interviewed a woman who wrote every day for a year. It helped her forget her dead husband.”

  “You mean it helped her forget her sadness?” I asked, staring at his logo-nipple. I couldn’t figure out if the fabric was just that lumpy, or if the Cha’s nipples poked through shirts weirdly.

  “You know what I mean,” the Cha said, waving like he was fed up. “Take it and write.” He placed his hands over mine and pushed the notepad closer to me.

  “Got it, I think,” I said. “Anything else I should know or do?”

  “Tomorrow you’ll start doing chores,” he answered. “We all earn our keep. There are robes in your room. Don’t mess them up, we’re not made of money.” He pointed at the hallway to the left of him. “It’s the second door. Don’t be an idiot and get lost.”

  I started to ask him if there was a schedule of monk things for the day, or a list of Buddhist objectives I’m supposed to meet for my dad’s bon, but the Cha interrupted me.

  “Tell your uncle I said hello,” he said, like my temple week had already ended. “I’m gonna whip his ass at poker night,” he also said. Then he flew across the prayer mats, straight into his office.

  In my room, I turned the notepad over and found hella grease stains, plus the words SPEEDY TRANSMISSIONS MANUFACTURER printed in bubble letters, above a cartoon car with big round eyes. The Cha doesn’t realize that hundreds of these dirty notepads live in Pou’s house. And since I live with my uncle, too, and have for years because Dad was no help, the Cha’s gift felt empty. He basically re-regifted me something my uncle had regifted to him. I waited in my room for the rest of the afternoon, for a monk to come for me, or the Cha, whose literal job is to be a mediator between the monks and normal guys like me, but no one did. When I finally left to hunt for food, the monks seemed surprised to see me. They forgot why I was here.

  Now I’m at the wat for five more days, and not much has happened since the Cha gave me the notepad. I don’t have many feelings worth writing down, so I jot down lists of what I count. When the Cha sees me writing, he doesn’t ask me to do random shit for the monks. He thinks I’m processing my sadness and leaves me alone. I wouldn’t mind doing things for the monks if those things mattered, if they did something for Dad’s spirit, but the Cha makes it seem like they’re just chores.

  Sometimes when I’m writing, I think about my uncle, how he’s probably doing his same-old self at the house. Every night Pou comes back from fixing cars and he counts how much money he made. He adds up his paychecks, bills, and expenses, along with the number of push-ups he did that morning, all in his dirty notepads. When I try to throw out his old notepads, Pou hurls empty beer cans at my head. I guess breathing in those stacked-up notepads is another way for him to keep track of how much he’s gained.

  STEPS FROM MY ROOM

  to the prayer room, where I keep falling asleep while praying, 25

  to the kitchen, where the grandmas slip me extra food, 58

  to the fountain, which is pretty peaceful, 115

  It’s not that I don’t like the monks. Some are chill. Two of them split cigs with me in the mornings, after our prayer sessions and before our chores. I call them Monk B and Monk C because we don’t talk or share facts about ourselves, like our names. We smoke out by the fountain, away from all the statues of Buddha in the garden. I think the monks are trying to hide their smoking habits from all the Buddhas.

  But Monk A doesn’t like me. He’s always yelling at me for sweeping wrong or messing up the incense trays. He thinks I’m a fuckup for enlisting, according to the Cha. I probably am, so I don’t blame him or anything. What did the Cha say? Oh yeah, he said, “War’s not the best conversation starter, for any of us. Don’t you know shit about the Khmer Rouge?” I should keep that in mind from now on.

  Here is what I know about the monks: Monk A is skinny and Monk C is not, which I don’t get because there’s not much food here, unless there’s a funeral or a wedding or it’s Cambodian New Year. Monk B, though, is jacked, with black tattoos that wrap around his arms. The other day I asked Monk B how he got so jacked, if he did some monk training regimen. He shrugged and just kept smoking. Then he offered me another cig. He must do push-ups, maybe even pull-ups. Maybe his room has ceiling pipes he can hang from. I should’ve brushed up on Khmer. I would’ve been able to communicate with the monks. At least thank them for the cigs without sounding like a jackass.

  Monk B and C treat me well, but that’s because I’m a guest, not an actual monk. They also feel sorry, probably. No one expected me to follow tradition. Even Pou was surprised. “I don’t get why you wanna stay at the wat,” he said. “Everyone knows your dad was a dipshit,” he also said. I told him I feel like someone should do right by him. He had no one at the end of it all.

  There’s a new monk, too. Monk D’s my age, roughly my height and size, and speaks decent English compared to the other monks. He doesn’t smoke out by the fountain. He spends his time following Monk A because he’s in monk training. I bet he still feels out of place. I actually overheard Monk D’s real name from the Cha. No one calls him by it, so I’m not sure if it’s still his name. I wonder if the older monks say their old names in their heads. Do they think of themselves as only monks? Maybe when I leave for the army that will happen to me. I’ll stop thinking of myself as one thing, and as part of another. I wonder if that will make me a better or worse person.

  BEFORE SLEEP

  Push-ups, 88

  Sit-ups, 125

  Squats, 55

  Burpees, 50

  My third night at the wat, I went outside to jog laps around the backyard. Monk D was sitting on the ground, facing one of the Buddhas in the garden. He barely glanced at me when I sat down next to him. We did say hi to each other though. I mentioned that it seemed lik
e neither of us thought those temple mats were comfy, not enough to sleep well, and he nodded. He looked like he didn’t want to talk, but I stayed. I wasn’t gonna end the conversation myself. He was still a monk, and you can’t be rude to monks.

  “You see how this one is strange?” Monk D asked. I scoped out the other Buddhas in the garden. It was true, this Buddha was different from the rest. The colored paint was chipping and faded and the guy who’d made him added a ton of muscles that bulged out of the Buddha’s robes. I guess the statue maker was tired of Buddha being a fat guy people laugh at while shopping for chopsticks. I gave the Buddha a closer look and realized he was cross-eyed. He looked like a dumb jock, flexing until his pupils went all fucked up.

  “Why is that?” I asked. I actually didn’t expect Monk D to know why, or to keep speaking, but he told me about the Buddha. According to what Monk A told Monk D, the statue was gifted to the temple by this guy who donates money every year. Monk A didn’t want to offend the guy because of his donations, so he put the Buddha in the garden, with the other statues that come directly from Cambodia. The guy used to be a legit statue maker. Then he lost a couple of fingers, an eye, and most of his family in the genocide. Now he works as a janitor for a school. He still makes statues but they always turn out looking weird.

  Staring at the Buddha, I thought about the statue maker, how he doesn’t have a family to distract him from the talent he lost. Some little kids he could support and use as an excuse for not making statues.