Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  “Just pick a number so this drunk will shut the fuck up,” someone said to Visith and the last bridesmaid standing.

  Red in the face and covered in cognac-infused sweat, Visith stepped forward and rolled up his shirtsleeve. “I got this in the bag,” he said. “I mean, I was born a prince. If Pol Pot didn’t ruin Cambodia, I would’ve been the oldest son of the richest family in the province. It’s in my blood!”

  Marlon couldn’t help but notice the Rolex strapped to his uncle’s wrist, the multiple diamond rings circling his fingers, as Visith fished a number out of the can. Did he think he deserved more than this, Marlon wondered, and the thought unleashed an exhaustion that had been creeping on him all night, the feeling that nothing would ever be enough, that his entire existence had started with some chemical deficiency. He wanted another drink, a hit.

  “Seven hundred!” Visith shouted, holding his number high in the air.

  Then the bridesmaid stuck her hand into the can. When she pulled out her scrap, Marlon saw that it was the marked one he’d given to Visith. “Five hundred,” she said, disappointed.

  Visith whooped in celebration. He punched the air. “Say hello to the best cousin!” he hollered in a cry of triumph.

  “This is bullshit,” the bridesmaid said. “I would’ve totally won a dance-off.” She pointed antagonistically at Visith. “But you just had to be a baby!”

  The crowd roared in agreement.

  “He doesn’t deserve the win!” someone shouted.

  “Make him dance!” someone else shouted, and the rowdy cousins started chanting: “Dance! Dance! Dance!”

  “Fuck you all!” Visith slurred. “Bunch of sore losers.”

  Marlon stepped away from Visith, aligning himself with the crowd. Motherfucker has to be lying, he thought, there was no way he gifted that much money.

  “Let me tell you the difference between winning and losing,” Visith now said, clearing the floor with a grand flailing of his arms, and also the slobber he spit on everyone. “It’s shame! Losers have shame and winners don’t. You think you’re gonna make me feel bad about changing the game?” Visith scoffed an aggressive laugh, loud enough that the cousins went silent. “Fuck that,” he continued. “That’s exactly how you win! How do you think our family became rich? How some of us stayed rich while others sat on their asses doing jack shit? It’s time for a lesson, straight from my mouth to your ignorant brains!”

  Visith wiped the sweat off his forehead, prepared himself to take down the crowd, to assert himself as the ELDEST COUSIN, while Marlon suddenly understood how dumb his plan had been, how easy it would’ve been to jot down any old number onto that scrap of paper, how maybe everyone was right to see him as the PRIVILEGED FAILURE whose parents kept bailing him out.

  “Our family,” Visith started, “we used to jump on any advantage we could. Great-great-Gong came from China, stepped onto a piece of land in Battambang, and he decided, ‘This shit is mine.’ He didn’t care that villagers already lived there. The baller just started building his rice factory, then convinced the villagers it would benefit them to work for him. Why worry about land when you can clock in hours and get paid salaries? Did he tell them how much money he would make versus them? Hell no, he wasn’t a goddamn loser. He made business decisions without shame, took whatever he fucking wanted.” Chest puffed up, nostrils flared out, Visith walked the invisible perimeter between him and the cousins. “That’s why I’m successful and you dumbasses aren’t: I remember how we became rich. I don’t let anything set me back, see?—I don’t give a fuck.”

  Visith stopped when he reached Marlon and the FAMOUS SINGER. He was staring Marlon down, snickering and heaving like a madman, with bloodshot eyes and an assault of body odor. “You know what I’m talking about,” Visith said, petting Marlon’s head. And then, as if to prove his larger point, Visith turned toward the FAMOUS SINGER, grabbed her by the waist, and forced a kiss on her mouth.

  The cousins in the garage flinched, at the sight of their uncle’s sloppy moves, a couple of the bridesmaids even gasping, and Marlon watched in disbelief as the FAMOUS SINGER shoved Visith off, as she whacked him several times—hard enough to make it clear that a line had been seriously crossed, but light enough to avoid a real scene. He found himself thinking, Someone should punch this fucker in the face, and as soon as he’d completed the thought, Marlon’s right first was colliding into his uncle’s nose, forcing a howl of pain from his throat, so that of course Visith retaliated by punching his aggressor in the ribs, cracking one or two, Marlon swore, groaning, crouching from the pain, and then lunging at his uncle, both of them falling to the ground, hammering blows into guts and maneuvering skulls into headlocks and limbs into half nelsons, until neither could maintain a steady breath at all, really, their panting and slobbering the music of pure, childish violence, and until Monica burst into the garage, ordering all the dumbstruck bystanders to pull the idiot man-babies off each other.

  From across the room, Marlon stared at the blood dripping from those nostrils as the lunatic, held back by two boy cousins, continued to scream at him. His thoughts mushrooming into a dense fog, Marlon felt the alcohol draining from his aching, bruised body. He considered bailing on this party, just walking out the door and going anywhere, like all those times he had joined another sports team, started another extracurricular activity, hung out in another empty parking lot downing cough syrup with his friends, just so he could avoid dealing with his dad, his mom, even his younger brother. Of course this party had ended with blood everywhere. He was born in the midst of chaos, so how the hell could he ever prevent it?

  VI.

  THE FAMOUS SINGER TEACHES EVERYONE THE TRADITIONAL BUTT-GRABBING GAME OF MATRIMONY

  Marlon made it as far as the living room before the guilt stopped him. Leaving Bond to finish their mission alone simply wasn’t an option. And where would he even go? He wasn’t in high school anymore. There were no friends to hit up. There was nothing for him outside of this house, this party, his family. All he had now was Bond.

  He stumbled his way back up the hallway, bursting through each door to see if his younger brother stood behind it. After walking right into a closet and then a bathroom, where a bridesmaid was just then vomiting into the toilet, he found Bond smoking weed in a bedroom. The sight of his brother immediately lulled Marlon into a calm. “Hey, it’s a you painting,” he said, sitting next to Bond at the foot of the bed.

  “Ming bought it at my first show,” Bond said, giving Marlon the joint. “What the hell was that in the garage? Sounded like a zoo out there.”

  “Nothing. Visith’s nose might be broken. My fault, I guess.”

  Bond shot Marlon a knowing glance.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Marlon said. “He totally deserved it. Probably.”

  “So he didn’t gift any money?”

  “He claims he did.”

  Bond seized the joint from Marlon. He took a hit, then blew smoke in his brother’s face. “You don’t deserve this, and also shouldn’t have it.”

  “Come on,” Marlon said. “I’m super sober now, after Visith beat the fuck out of me. One of my ribs might be, like, really broken.”

  “Yeah, that’s not how alcohol works.”

  “Man . . . you know you wanna get high with your older bro.”

  “Fine, here.” Bond lifted the joint to his brother’s mouth, and Marlon inhaled its smoke deeply, only to immediately start coughing.

  “For a recovering drug addict, you really can’t handle your shit,” Bond said, and they both laughed. Then the brothers studied the painting in front of them: their mom with a riotous perm, standing in a field of rose bushes, donning the kind of bright patterns found in the eighties.

  “I’ve always liked this one.”

  “Yeah? So why’d you get so fucked up at my show?”

  “The real question is why weren’t you fucked up,” Marlon said, grinning. He passed the joint back to his brother. “I mean, for a starving hipster artis
t and all, you’ve gotten pretty uptight.”

  Bond sighed. “I used to be so cool,” he half joked.

  He remembered the night of his first show, how he’d known instantly Marlon was relapsing, maybe with a handful of painkillers, a dash of Adderall for sure, to get through his twelve-hour workday. He sensed it from Marlon’s clammy hands, his dilated, searching pupils, the way his greasy hair kept falling into his face. Why had he then allowed his brother to drink an entire bottle of wine, before passing out in the corner, triggering yet another spell of their mother’s killer depressions? He looked at Marlon. It was hard not to admire the way his brother’s features seemed a perfect mingling of their parents’.

  “My bullshit probably sucked the coolness right out of you.” Marlon stared intently ahead, his expression dead serious. “I’m sorry, you know? For being, like, the worst older brother.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bond said brusquely, feeling a dull pang in his chest. “If you weren’t, Dad would be, like, way more pissed over the loans I have from majoring in art.” Through his stoned eyes, the painting had started to bleed into the wall, roses proliferating across his frame of view. He wondered if Marlon could see the same vision he did, before realizing how stupid a thought that was, before he noticed a familiar tinge of anguish in his brother’s slight grin. He knew Marlon was waiting for him to say something else. Perhaps his joke about their dad hadn’t been enough to alleviate the pressure, the guilt, the crazy whirlwind of thoughts, his older brother was always feeling. But he couldn’t bring himself to utter a word, not even to mention what he’d been obsessing over all night—the mission, Marlon’s drinking, their mom.

  The door swung open, and Bond and Marlon looked over to find the FAMOUS SINGER. “Fuck,” Bond said, ash dropping onto his pants, “this is the room you’re staying in?”

  The FAMOUS SINGER raised one eyebrow, gleamed a patronizing look, and waved over at the piles and piles of her luggage in the corner. Then she sat down and accepted the joint from Bond—a peace offering.

  “In Cambodia, we put this on pizza,” she said, exhaling smoke, “and call it happy pizza.”

  “You should write a song about that,” Marlon said.

  “I am writing a song about it,” the FAMOUS SINGER said, to Marlon’s surprise. She sucked in another hit, killing the last of the weed. “You think I am making a joke. No, I am serious. Cambodians, we never let ourselves enjoy life. It is always thinking on the past, worrying for the future.”

  “That’s no good,” Bond responded.

  “Did you find out how much money Visith gifted, or do you need to inquire with the BRIDE, like I said?”

  “Not entirely confirmed,” Marlon said.

  “I expect little from that child,” the FAMOUS SINGER said, standing up and smoothing over the creases in her dress. “Come with me. I have an idea, a good one.”

  Both in a daze, Marlon and Bond followed the FAMOUS SINGER into the living room, where Mariah Carey’s voice still blasted from the speaker. The cousins were milling about, some too drunk to change the playlist, others already too hungover to care. Visith sat on the sectional couch, stripped down to his undershirt. Surrounded by her fellow bridesmaids, Monica stood by the kitchen island, furiously discussing the bottomless stupidity of every boy cousin at the party. Someone had made cognac-Gatorade margaritas, and half-empty cups of bright green littered all the hard surfaces, and even some of the softer, rounder ones—like the couch cushions—these cups precarious in their positioning.

  The FAMOUS SINGER instructed Marlon and Bond to line up five chairs in a row, in front of the sectional and everyone else in the room. When the formation was finished, she stood up on a chair, drawing the room’s attention with her expert stage presence. “A little bird told me,” the FAMOUS SINGER said, “that Visith will also be married soon, to a woman living in Cambodia.”

  “Yeah,” Visith said, “that’s true.” He glared at Marlon as if he were about to tackle him to the ground.

  “Well, if you want to marry a woman from Cambodia, you must obey tradition,” the FAMOUS SINGER said. “So I will teach everyone a ceremony to perform at Visith’s wedding.” The FAMOUS SINGER gestured at Visith. “Here, take my place and turn your back to your audience.” Then she pointed for Bond, Marlon, and two other boy cousins to join Visith on the remaining chairs. “I will act as Visith’s bride for this demonstration,” the FAMOUS SINGER continued. “In this game, the bride will be blindfolded, and she must touch all the men’s behinds and guess, just from touching, which behind belongs to her husband.”

  “This cannot be real,” Monica said, scowling with disgust and delight, to which the FAMOUS SINGER beamed a sternness that convinced all the cousins of the ceremony’s deep legitimacy.

  “Now, let me start the demonstration.”

  With rapt attention, the room watched the FAMOUS SINGER pretend to pat the thighs and glutes of the standing men. The palpable awkwardness of the situation made everyone smile, and when the mere proximity of the FAMOUS SINGER and her alarming beauty almost caused Visith to slip and fall to the floor, everyone burst into laughter. For a brief moment, the cousins, even the ones elevated on the chairs, were again a bunch of kids, a brand new generation in a strange country, still learning what it means to be Cambodian.

  After the demonstration was over, the cousins returned to their conversations and their half-empty drinks. The five men descended from their positions. On his way back to the sectional, Visith rammed into Marlon with a forceful shove of his shoulder, but before anyone could react, Bond took hold of Marlon’s arm and pulled him down, so that the brothers were now just slumping into those chairs. “Yeah, I don’t think you wanna start another fight,” Bond said. “Not after the ass-grabbing wedding game of our ancestors.”

  Soon the FAMOUS SINGER was sitting down next to them. She covertly handed Bond a leather object, nodding with a stiff and steady motion to keep her hair in place. “It belongs to Visith,” she said, winking to signal that she’d picked their uncle’s pocket. Quickly shifting to block Visith’s view, Bond looked down, turning the stolen wallet over in his hands, feeling its bulky heft.

  “What’re you waiting for?” Marlon asked.

  “All right,” Bond said, “calm your shit.” He pried the wallet open, and there, inside, nestled between a wad of bills, was a red envelope. “How did you know this would be here?” he asked the FAMOUS SINGER, who shrugged and said, “I assumed having his possessions would help. It is simple logic.”

  “What does this mean?” Marlon asked.

  “Well,” Bond answered, “it really does look like Visith was hiding his ang pav, you know, from everyone else.”

  “Wow,” Marlon said. “So I was actually right?”

  “Yeah, motherfucker definitely gave squat,” Bond replied, and tossed the wallet under his chair.

  “Dad will have his proof now,” Marlon said.

  “And Mom will be happy,” Bond said. “Well, happier.”

  And with that, the brothers sighed in mutual relief. They both—yes, Bond as well, to Marlon’s delight—grinned at one another with juvenile giddiness. For the moment, they could do nothing else.

  VII.

  THE DRUNKEN CONVERSATIONS CAMBOS HAVE AT 3:42 A.M.

  “Sometimes I forget we grew up with the same stuff, you know?” Marlon said, before taking a drink from a dwindling bottle of Hennessy. They were sitting outside on the front lawn, their asses chilled by the morning dew. “Like, do you remember when we were kids and Dad would be working at the power plant? So it would be us two trying to make Mom feel better, cooking her, like, the worst food ever, like those grilled cheeses we microwaved?”

  “Yeah, and then I was the one who dealt with Mom,” Bond said, taking the bottle from Marlon. “In high school, you were always busy.” He poured cognac into his mouth, and then stared out into the dark sky. “The other day I had this realization, you know, that I actually started making art because it was the easiest way to pass time.
Mom would lie in bed, staring off into space, talking about her dead siblings, and I’d draw on the floor of her room.”

  Marlon considered his brother’s profile. He thought about all the times he’d raged too hard in his life, how often he’d taken his parents too seriously, as an influence so immense he needed to uphold their expectations and also transgress against them, because to have just one reaction would never suffice. “That was dumb of me.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Bond said, bringing the bottle back to his lips.

  “It’s weird,” Marlon said. “I’ve been back at home, you know, and everything’s reversed from when we grew up. Dad makes tons of money now. Mom’s healthy and she’s hella extra about making sure I don’t relapse. She cooks, like, every day. She does my laundry, and I keep telling her I can do it—hell, I used to do her laundry.”

  “So, like, what’re you trying to say?”

  “I don’t know, man. Don’t you find that a little weird?”

  Bond peered down the hill, across the lawn, at the Lexus SUV parked on the street. Sure, he had noticed all that, he’d lived it—how he and his brother were raised in a one-bedroom apartment and then, out of nowhere, well into his own adolescence, his parents upgraded to a four-bedroom house in a gated community. But what was there to say? The whiplash he felt about their lives seemed inexpressible, at least in words. Maybe this was the curse of being a painter. His exact thoughts and feelings solidified in oils, only coming to him slowly, latently, after summoning mental images that might translate into scenes, once brush was applied to canvas.

  “Oh,” Marlon said, “I forgot.” He sifted through his pockets, removed a handful of wedding favors, and piled them on the lawn. “Scored some candy.”