Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  In my room we sat on my sleeping mat, high as fuck, our backs against the wall. I showed Monk D a photo of Maly, which had been in the jeans I’d worn coming to the temple. It was printed on regular computer paper. Nothing special. Maly was smiling and sitting on the beach in a bikini, the happiest she’s been, I like to think. It was the only time we got out of town together. Monk D was in awe of the photo. He held it close to his face. “Stop hogging my girlfriend,” I said, laughing, pushing his hands so we could both see her. I left my hand on top of his. I felt nice touching his skin.

  It was a damn good photo of Maly. Seeing its effect on Monk D reminded me of that, made me feel content about myself. Like I’d accomplished something real in having Maly as a girlfriend. My hand made its way to Monk D’s upper thigh. His hand rested on my knee, still holding the photo. Our eyes both fixed on Maly, but I think we saw each other, too, and ourselves. My other hand reached under my robes, started stroking. He did the same. Neither of us were rushing. Finishing didn’t seem like the point.

  “We shouldn’t make a mess,” I said. “The Mas won’t appreciate cleaning cum off our robes.” Monk D nodded in agreement, head moving up and down, at the same pace as his wrist. I looked around the room. There was only the sleeping mat, my normal clothes, and another Buddha statue.

  “We could do it on Buddha,” I joked.

  “You wanna get me kicked out?” he said.

  “Do monks ever get fired from their jobs?” I asked.

  Monk D slowed down his stroking. “I’m not trying to find out.”

  “I guess this is the best place to do it,” I said, pointing at the photo.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I considered what it would mean if we came onto a photo of Maly. Then I wondered if I was spending too much time worrying about a piece of paper. I rose to my knees and took the photo from him. “Let’s do it on the back side,” I said, turning it over. He got up, too, and faced me in the same position, like we were reflections. For balance he grabbed my shoulder. I let go of myself. He unloaded himself. And I felt transported.

  THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO

  Not sure yet but I’m sure something will come up

  something has before

  By the time Pou picks me up it’s already dark. The winter days are short, his shifts are long. I spent most of the day with Monk D. We did our chores, ate lunch in the field, said bye. We didn’t talk about the previous night. But we shared something between us, and that felt good, like how I used to feel when I’d get donuts with Dad.

  “I’ll see you,” Monk D said when it was time for me to go. He punched my side. “At some wedding when you get back, I’ll be doing the blessing, and you’ll have to serve me food.”

  “Yeah, for sure,” I said, punching him back.

  In Pou’s truck I watch the wat shrink in the side mirror. It’s a black blob again, a shadow. You can’t see the temple’s details, none of the monks walking around. None of the fake gold lamps. Not the peeling orange, yellow, and blue paint. The rusty old parking signs in Khmer, darkness covers them completely. The way you can tell it’s the temple is by the outline. I wonder if that’s all you can know about someone, their outline. I wonder what will end up as mine.

  We turn left and the wat leaves my sight. “The Cha’s obsessed with Khmer covers of the Beatles,” I say.

  Pou laughs. “Well, Khmer folk played the songs better.” He kept his eyes on the road. “It’s ’cause America stole sounds from us in the first place. They stole our sounds and they dropped bombs on us and now you wanna go fight for them, you stupid shit.”

  He grabs my shoulder and gives me a nudge. “Just kidding,” Pou adds. “Look, I know the Cha’s giving you a hard time. He’s only joking. I was looking it up, and there are a lot of benefits you get from enlisting. You can go to college. You’ll always have a job. I get worried about you, that you’ll become like your dad, like a dipshit. But this is a smart move. Logical.” He continues talking about the reasons my decision makes sense. He counts off all the financial benefits I would have. I nod, and keep nodding.

  The streets outside slowly become more city-like as we get farther from the wat. Fewer abandoned barns and more empty parking lots. More buses and less dirt. As Pou talks, I realize I never asked Monk D why he came to the temple. I can see his reasons though, a shitload of them. I can see the expectations crowding his old life, both his own and the ones hurled at him, how they probably stopped running together right, how adding them up to total one person, it’d result in a Frankenstein-looking giant. Its proportions all fucked up, it’d limp around, yell out noises that weren’t words, and try to be understood. And I can see that in becoming a monk, he could shed these expectations, replace them with something else. Something with a clear outline. But if I tell Monk D this, I bet he’d blow smoke in my face and laugh, pass me his cig and urge me to chill. Somethings can’t be explained to death, he’d say. Guess they don’t need to be, I’d say. That’s how shit goes, we’d say.

  We Would’ve Been Princes!

  I.

  ENOUGH HENNESSY FOR AN AFTERPARTY

  Thank god, Buddha, the monks, and the CHA, who didn’t get as drunk as usual, who piloted the prayers and ceremonies with aplomb, and don’t forget those other party animals who trashed the banquet room—whom the cousins called Mings and Pous because, sure, everyone at the reception was related, anyone over the age of forty was definitely someone’s auntie or uncle—bless them all, the WEDDING was done. And the cousins of the BRIDE could at last liberate themselves from their duties; from the itchy traditional outfits that were rentals, so nobody knew if they’d ever, really, been washed; from the praying in one-hundred-degree weather, chanting words that meant nothing to the BRIDE and GROOM, getting palm flowers chucked at their faces by tipsy guests; and, most tedious of all, from being subjected, whether as witness or participant, to the never-ending photo ops, with the BRIDAL PARTY arranged in the middle of a golf course, next to a man-made lake, during the golden hour of sunrise, and then again, twelve hours later, backlit by the sunset, with the GROOM shaking the hands of his groomsmen, individually and then all at once, like they were playing the human knot, and then, of course, a candid shot of the BRIDE and her bridesmaids having their makeup repainted, then the BRIDE posing with her parents, then with her siblings, then with her half siblings, then with her cousins, second cousins, third cousins twice removed, then with the in-laws, then with the family that owns Chuck’s Donuts and the other family that owns Angkor Pharmacy, and finally these same poses all over again, but in the white, American dress.

  So let the real drinking commence! Their new location was still undetermined, but it hardly mattered—anyplace but Dragon Palace Restaurant, which had been packed to the gills with three hundred California Valley Cambos. No more stuck-up Pous pretending they have royal blood, that this city was the Hollywood of celebrity ex-refugees, that the sidewalk off El Dorado Street was one giant red carpet for them to strut down. No more downplaying how much they drank in front of their Gongs and Mas. The younger crowd knew better than to get sloshed in front of their seventy-year-old devout Buddhist grandparents who had survived not just genocide, but the AUTOGENOCIDE. Especially not after the BRIDE’s fifth-favorite cousin, Marlon—straddling the edge of blackout drunk like a true recovering drug addict—danced with too much verve next to the FAMOUS SINGER, who had been flown out from Phnom Penh by their resident RICH MING. But now the grown-ups were gone! The BRIDE and GROOM were already on their way to Vegas for honeymoon gambling! Even Marlon’s younger brother, Bond, the BRIDE’s eighth-favorite cousin, had loosened the tie looped around his neck.

  The FAMOUS SINGER was asking for a ride to RICH MING’s vacant rental home, which was both the headquarters for the BRIDAL PARTY, and also guest lodgings for the FAMOUS SINGER. Her voice coarse from singing for hours on end, the FAMOUS SINGER needed a hot lemon water to soothe her throat, she claimed, and drank tea brewed only with Evian mineral water.


  “Here I am to save the day!” Marlon screamed, launching himself into the air, landing on a chair before the FAMOUS SINGER. Holding two unopened bottles of Hennessy cognac, he jumped down and fell to one knee, as if offering booze in exchange for her hand in marriage. “I’ll even drive you!”

  “You are drunk, boy,” the FAMOUS SINGER whispered, unwilling to raise her voice now that she was no longer, technically, on the clock.

  “Then my beautiful brother will drive us!” Marlon sang. He pointed a bottle to the right, though Bond stood to his left. “But you gottta bring everyone home for an afterparty.” He swung his bottles around to indicate that he meant the twenty- and thirty-year-olds scattered about the empty dinner tables, all the cousins of the BRIDE.

  The FAMOUS SINGER aimed her symmetrical face at Bond. “How much did you drink?” she asked, her fake eyelashes batting a mini hurricane.

  “We need more time in your presence!” Marlon slurred.

  “It’s okay, I can drive,” Bond said, eyes glued to the FAMOUS SINGER’s six-inch heels.

  “So what do you say?” Marlon asked, standing up and grinning. Something about his unabashed drunkenness, his gleeful childlike pronouncements, complemented his broad shoulders. “Party with us?”

  Was it blood that zoomed to the FAMOUS SINGER’s cheeks or just maternal pity? Being handsome and pathetic was Marlon’s selling point. Mothers adored that poor fellow brimming with wasted possibility. “Fine, but I need to drink my lemon water,” the FAMOUS SINGER said, and the crowd of cousins cheered. Everyone snatched a bottle of leftover Hennessy, a takeout box of lobster scraps and fried rice drenched in lobster juice, and then rallied to RICH MING’s rental home.

  II.

  A RUNDOWN OF THE OBJECTIVE, AS MARLON’S TOO DRUNK TO REMEMBER

  Bond knew he should have stopped Marlon from the beginning. All night he’d wanted to yank the Heinekens from Marlon’s grasp. Wanted to intercept his older brother’s swigs of cognac like a basketball player blocking his opponent’s every shot. But he was no athlete, not like Marlon. He worked as a paralegal in San Francisco but thought of himself as a struggling painter who lived in Oakland—the word struggling feeling more redundant with every passing year, despite his BA in art practice from UC Berkeley.

  Driving their dad’s new Lexus SUV, Bond glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Marlon’s drunken body sprawled across the back seat, while in the passenger seat the FAMOUS SINGER reapplied her lipstick. It must be hard to look that good, Bond thought, before recalling Marlon in rehab, how his brother had gelled his hair every morning, swept it into a seamless black wave. Bond figured it was the best way Marlon could remember who the hell he was.

  Marlon sat up, and in the rearview mirror, his limbs appeared to snap into their rightful place. He leaned forward, bracing himself against the center console. The smell of alcohol and sweat rushed into the front half of the car. “Who the fuck even is Visith?”

  “He’s our parents’ second cousin,” Bond said in a mock serious, flat voice. “Just closer to our age. He owns the jewelry place on March Lane. You’re so drunk you forgot your own uncle?”

  “No, I get that,” Marlon answered. “I want to know why he, like, matters.”

  Of course he’d already forgotten! Bond gripped the steering wheel harder, the fat premium leather awkward in his hands. He fought the urge to pick at his stress acne. A scene from earlier that night crashed into his thoughts: their mom in tears, pushing away her plate of lobster, ditching their dinner table to sit by herself after she’d tried scolding the tipsy out of Marlon’s bloodstream, to which Marlon had joked, “It’s not like I’m on meth!” At the center of the table were wide glass cylinders, filled with drowning orchids and topped by candles. How Bond had wished the BRIDE would turn off the ceiling lights; it would’ve been the craziest, most amazing painting, all those tiny floating flames.

  Now the FAMOUS SINGER was glittering the area around her eye sockets, lightly dabbing her skull with two fingers. “Visith is a good Khmer name,” she said. “Not like you two, who do not have Khmer names at all.”

  “Fuck that shit!” Marlon shouted into their ears. “We’re named after Marlon Brando and James fucking Bond! Which, in fact—the logic’s so Cambodian it hurts: name your kids after the first movies you saw after immigrating, and bam!” Marlon clapped his hands together, the sound like thunder. “American Dream achieved!” He thrashed his head up and down to the Kanye song playing on the radio.

  “Marlon Brando . . . like STELLA, STELLA!” the FAMOUS SINGER sang, and Marlon joined her.

  “STELLAAAAAAAAAA!”

  His head-banging escalated into a solitary mosh pit.

  “Anyway,” Bond said, “we gotta find out how much Visith gifted at the wedding.” He was referring to the mission they’d agreed on back at the reception, while unloading themselves in adjacent urinals. The drunkenness had temporarily drained out of Marlon, enough for him to realize the extent that he must’ve bruised their mom’s feelings. It’ll calm her down to know, Bond had told his older brother, as they washed their hands with the restaurant’s diluted pink soap. It was the best they could do. “Remember? For Mom?”

  “Right,” Marlon said, breathing more alcohol yet into the Lexus. “For Mom.”

  That night, before their mother had stormed off in tears, the BRIDE, the GROOM, and the BRIDAL PARTY, in a customary procession, zigzagged through the dinner tables, collecting ang pavs the bridesmaids had placed on every seat. Subjecting the newlyweds to hazing rituals, the grown-ups stood on their chairs and forced the BRIDE to grab their red gift envelopes, all stuffed with cash, from high above her head, with only her teeth, while they also cheered for the GROOM to plant wet kisses on the lips of Mings and Mas and one wasted Gong.

  At their table, Marlon and Bond’s dad, a strict proponent of tradition who loved to outclass his peers, had initially filled their family’s collective envelopes with six thousand dollars. Which induced their mom to plead, desperately, for the family to spend less money, in case something horrible happened, such as—though it was left unsaid—Marlon’s pill addiction resurfacing and his returning to rehab. Then Marlon spotted Visith heading for the bathroom, right as the bridal procession was approaching his table. “Woah, is Visith trying to swerve his gifting duties?” Marlon casually asked, igniting a frenzy of outraged speculations from their mom, who would now—Bond knew—not be able to sleep at all. Her righteous indignation, when piqued, was known to rev up her chronic insomnia.

  “I swear, on Buddha himself,” Marlon said, resprawling his limbs across the back seat, “Visith fucking slipped his ang pav right into his pocket so he could ignore it.”

  The FAMOUS SINGER shook her head. “That is not okay,” she said. “He is of the age to be giving back. The BRIDE and the GROOM need that money to build new lives.”

  “Yeah, and our parents are hella petty,” Marlon added. “They’re, like, dying for an excuse to give jack shit at Visith’s own stupid wedding, you know, especially if he ain’t paying his dues. Our mom can’t stand him. She doesn’t wanna attend his wedding next month—it’s basically a green card marriage for this rando chick from Battambang whose parents are buying Visith a new goddamn house—but our pops is making her go. She’s hated the motherfucker ever since the guy sold her fake-ass diamonds.”

  “Which she got refunded,” Bond said.

  “Only after hounding him for weeks,” Marlon said. “And he gave some bullshit explanation about inventory errors.”

  “So Visith is not respectable,” the FAMOUS SINGER said, retouching her face with blush. “Shame—he has a Rolex, too, like a hard worker.”

  Marlon made an ugly sound around his tongue.

  “He wears Rolexes as marketing for his jewelry store,” Bond explained, and Marlon contributed an even more obnoxious noise. “Still,” Bond continued, rolling his eyes, “Visith has decent business, so it’s hard to see why he wouldn’t shell out some money. It’s not like everyone in the family needs to g
ive more than, like, a hundred bucks.” He turned the car left, onto the street that was lined with the rental properties owned by RICH MING—the lady had practically bought up the whole neighborhood. He slowed down and squinted to see the address numbers on the dark houses.

  “Yeah, well,” Marlon said, “motherfucker never tips at Ming Lee’s noodle shop either.”

  “You’re fucking drunk,” Bond said. “We need, like, actual proof. If not for Mom, then for Dad to agree with Mom.”

  “You cannot inquire with the BRIDE?” the FAMOUS SINGER asked.

  “Oh my god, have you met her?” Marlon sprang back into an upright position. “Let’s just get him, like, seriously messed up,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his younger brother’s suit jacket, which caused Bond to jerk the car into a whiplashing stop, the tires screeching against the asphalt.

  “Jesus Christ!” Bond yelled, elbowing his brother. “Can you just—not?”

  Marlon backed off and grinned. He held up a joint. “I knew you had one!” he said. “Now we can lure him into a confession—people always spill when they’re high.”

  “Getting him cross-faded isn’t gonna do shit,” Bond said, snatching his joint back from his brother. “That’s not our plan.”

  “You have a better idea?” Marlon asked, and Bond grimaced.

  “Okay. Fine,” Bond said. “That’s the plan until we figure out a better plan.” He almost blurted, Please don’t get more wasted yourself, but then found himself thinking, Well, at least he’s not doing meth.

  “That is a dumb idea,” the FAMOUS SINGER scoffed. “What is wrong with asking the BRIDE?”

  “Her mom’s best friends with Visith’s older sister, for one thing,” Bond said, stepping on the gas pedal. “And both have big mouths. Our parents don’t want anyone to know they’re thinking of snubbing Visith. They hate gossip.”