Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly

  Right after I shot out of my mother’s womb, Somaly latched on to my body with such spite, no wonder I still dream that I am, and will never stop being, her. That’s what the Mas and Gongs have told me at least, that I was a sickly baby, so thin my bones poked through sparse layers of fat. Then, as a toddler, I burned through pounds of food and never gained weight. Whenever I had three plates of rice or more, I was summoning Somaly, chanting secrets known exclusively by the dead.

  The ritual required plain rice. Adding a drop of anything ruined the grains’ white purity, scared her off from this world. Rice was sacred, after all, the only food Somaly stomached following the brutal murder of her father, Battambang’s very own Rice Factory King. The leaders of the concentration camp slit her father’s liver right from the gut, only days before the fall of Pol Pot, and then feasted on it for good luck. They believed it was steeped with the flavor of his lost fortune, that if they drowned their rice with his bile, stained every speck reddish brown—the color of blood mixing with earth—they might survive the Vietnamese invasion. This was how the Mas and Gongs have explained Somaly’s aversion for tainted rice. Not that her father wasn’t doomed from the start, according to Somaly, as only I know, having carried her spirit all these years.

  Maybe this is why I am the only nurse in the Alzheimer’s and dementia unit who doesn’t refer to our patients’ recreational hour as “herding the dying cows” or “midafternoon of the walking dead” or “playtime for the rusty shit machines.” Because, unlike Nurse Anna or Nurse Kelly or even Nurse Jenny, my friend, I know something about disorientation. I understand how it feels to live with a past that defies logic.

  ROOM 39 UNLEASHES A STREAM of shit right as I’m carrying her to the bathroom. She’s screaming about her late husband, dead now over a decade, how she needs to crush gout medicine into his scrambled eggs. “Do you want Mike’s feet to get swollen?” Room 39 cries in my arms, the shit seeping through her nightgown and onto my scrubs. So there’s diarrhea on me, but I try not to hold it against her. His gout must’ve been real intense if he couldn’t wait a moment longer, not even for his wife to squat on the toilet.

  “Someone should pull the plug on Room 39,” Jenny says to me in the staff locker room.

  “That’s dark,” I say, wearing only my bra and underwear. Our thirty-minute break is almost over and I’m still washing my scrubs, rubbing a Tide to Go pen into the brown stains. It’s the fifth one I’ve uncapped in the past month. “That would put us out of our jobs, you know. I’m not trying to work at McDonald’s.”

  “Which is the only reason I am not—at this very moment—smothering my patients in their sleep,” Jenny says with a smirk. We’re both young, just out of nursing school, and the kind of idiots who agree to work in the Alzheimer’s and dementia unit, with the worst patients of Saint Joseph’s Elderly Care, the ones whose minds are mushed into pulp. Jenny’s always talking about leaving this dump, moving up the ranks of nursedom, and working at Kaiser Permanente, a nurse’s dream job, apparently. Kaiser’s on the nice side of town, where the sidewalk trees are pruned by the city and decorated during Christmas, where you can buy something to eat that doesn’t involve a drive-through.

  “Whew, that smells nasty,” Jenny continues. “Is she on Exelon? I swear it makes their shit smell worse, you know? Like they’re shitting after eating a pile of their own shit.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “No difference between this and changing a baby’s diaper.”

  “Baby shit’s pure, Serey,” she says, nasally, pinching her nose shut. “It’s, like, digested mashed-up carrots and breast milk. What we clean up is all jacked up with drugs. Like mutant shit, you know? Chemically enhanced.”

  “Like the X-men of shit,” I respond.

  “X-men of shit is too generous,” Jenny now says, her words echoey. “Our patients are, straight up, sacks of rotten meat.”

  I try rubbing harder and harder. “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “You go into room twenty-nine and tell me something isn’t rotting. I’ll trade room twenty-nine for room thirty any day.”

  “You told me to take rooms thirty to thirty-five,” I snap, recalling Jenny’s spiel about the extra shifts being my chance to impress management.

  Jenny sighs and crosses her arms. “Serey, it’s just so unfair. None of my patients have rooms with windows.”

  “Goddamn it,” I say, and throw my scrubs into the sink. “The stains won’t come out.”

  “Use my extra pair,” Jenny says. “Don’t fret.”

  “Thanks.” I close my eyes and lean against the lockers. I am already exhausted, but I have another four-hour shift.

  Before I can even rest my feet, I’m back in the hallway, rushing because the time has come to change Room 34’s sheets. It’s time to bathe her and administer the medication prescribed by her doctor. Which, I suspect, only makes the chemistry of her brain even murkier. I care more about this assignment because Room 34 is Ma Eng, my dead grandmother’s second cousin. Though she has a warped sense of our relationship, and not just because of her dementia. Of course, the dementia doesn’t help.

  The Mas and Gongs in my neighborhood think of me as Somaly’s reincarnation. When I was born, Ma Eng saw in my infant face her dead niece, Somaly, and with the amniotic fluid still coating my skin, my Pous and Mings all agreed with her, after which the monks, too, agreed, so unceasing was Ma Eng’s vision. The neighborhood threw a celebration to honor Somaly’s spirit, her peaceful transition back into life. It was supposed to end at that, with a blessing from the monks. Her reincarnation was thought of as a good omen for my future. Never was I supposed to live as her, and it came as a familiar shock when Ma Eng was first admitted here, a year ago, and started calling me Somaly.

  I knock on the door of Room 34 and hesitate the required beat—a courtesy enforced by management, despite our patients never being lucid enough to recognize a knock—before walking in to find Ma Eng sleeping, and also sleep-chanting in Khmer. She jolts when I wake her up, then takes me in with her sunken eyes. Her pupils are dilated and darting, searching for something she can recognize.

  You’ve gotten fat, Somaly, she says to me in Khmer. I look down at my body to realize that Jenny’s scrubs are several sizes too big. Then Ma Eng pinches my ear, almost twisting it off. She has a surprising amount of strength for a woman with osteoporosis. You’re not stealing food from the Communists, are you? You’ll get us killed!

  Ming, I need to give you a bath, I say through the pain, stumbling over my Khmer words, remembering to call her Ming. Whenever I assert that I am not her niece, Somaly, that I am actually just myself, Serey, that she is my Ma and I am her grandniece, whom she has known for twenty-three years, the entirety of my current life, Ma Eng gets mad and slaps me across the face. She tells me to stop being childish, even when I concede that I am merely a reincarnation. For a while now, I have played along with her delusions. And I’m not stealing food, I add, prying her fingers off my ear.

  Yes, if they’re going to execute me, she says, I will at least be clean. The Communists shot your father with dirt still on his face. It must have been humiliating for him.

  No one’s going to execute you, I say.

  After I help her out of the bed, we walk over to her private bathroom. My back slouched over, I am supporting her with my arms wrapped around her waist. She is heavy and light, obese and emaciated, that elderly mix of mature flesh, weakened organs, and brittle bones, which I have always found awkward to hold up. Imagine carrying a hot air balloon as it’s deflating, is how I describe it.

  Last month, Ma Eng smacked Nurse Anna right in the face, and continued to smack her all over, forcing Nurse Anna into a crouched position on the floor. Nurse Anna was already pissed at Ma Eng for being a difficult patient, and only got more pissed when I translated the Khmer that she wailed and wailed during the beatdown. Short and squat, she repeated, short and squat. Nurse Anna kept sounding off about Room 34 having assaulted
her. Management didn’t want the union to intervene, so they transferred Nurse Anna to a corridor placement far away from Ma Eng. They also reduced her workload, and then asked me to cover the rooms unassigned from Nurse Anna’s work reduction, including all aspects of Room 34’s caretaking—the morning, afternoon, and evening shifts. Previously I was responsible for Ma Eng only in the mornings, but management could no longer risk assigning a non-Khmer-speaking nurse to Room 34. I would have these extra duties, they told me, until they hired another Cambodian nurse part time. I asked them if they wanted referrals to Cambodian nurses I knew. They told me they would reach out when the funds became available.

  Ma Eng’s fat slips right over her bones after I undress her in the shower. I finally ask her who is short and squat in her life. The whore who killed our family, she says, and as I wash Ma Eng’s sagging breasts, something clicks in my head.

  I remember sitting in a living room surrounded by parents and grandparents. I was dressed in an oversize T-shirt, pajama pants decorated with monkeys, and a golden chain attached to a jade pendant. The grandparents had fed me plate after plate of white rice. Tell us something about Somaly, they chanted, drunk off Heinekens, as my stomach expanded with rice, making me sluggish and faint. Finally, as I dozed off, my mouth started moving, hissing words that never, really, belonged to me. A Ma heard slut. Someone else heard whore. A Gong grabbed me and sat me on his knee.

  It all makes sense, he said, patting me on the head. You did good, oun. He turned to the crowd. He said that he now knew why Somaly’s spirit was so restless inside my body; she sought revenge on her father’s mistress. Before the Khmer Rouge took over, Somaly’s mother, Ma Sor, he explained, had refused to let her husband’s whore flee with the family. But Gong Sor, that hopeless old dog, he just couldn’t leave his mistress behind. So no one fled and everyone suffered! A real tragedy.

  That’s nonsense, Ma Eng said, before asserting that the spirit of her niece, Somaly, wanted simply to be reunited with her daughter, Maly. She walked up to the Gong and picked me up. Now let this child go to sleep, Ma Eng said, handing me over to my mother, unaware of the nightmares that would plague my night.

  Now it’s time to wash Ma Eng’s private parts. Following our patient protocols, I announce to her the next area my hand is headed. Jenny never thoroughly cleans her patients’ genitalia, I know, almost to spite Nurse Anna’s purism. “It’s not like they’re having sex,” she jokes. I’m hardly the best nurse, but I work hard for Ma Eng. Inside room 34, I switch into overdrive, working with meticulous focus, even when I swear my limbs are getting pulled down extra hard by gravity.

  Dragging my washcloth down her stomach, I wince at the idea that Ma Eng might think I’m attacking her. But, of course, she wouldn’t, would she?—because I’m Somaly. My hand reaches its destination. Ma Eng stares right into my face. If a Communist touches you here, she says gravely, don’t fight. Fighting him off would be choosing death. Afterward, when I am spraying her with the showerhead, I wish I could say that Ma Eng hasn’t told me this already, so many times over.

  Mom’s sleeping on the couch, to the dinging and wooping of Family Feud, when I finally get home. On the kitchen table, some stir-fried tofu has congealed in a plastic bowl—probably left there for my dinner—but I dish out only cold rice so Mom can have tofu for tomorrow’s lunch, so we can spend a little less on groceries, so Dad won’t need yet another graveyard shift. Mom thinks I’m saving for my own house, where I’d raise the ten grandchildren she expects to pop out of me. She doesn’t know I never want kids, that I put away most of my paychecks. Dementia runs on both sides of our family, Mom suffers from carpal tunnel because of her Amazon packaging center job, and Dad has diabetes. I refuse to watch their minds and bodies deteriorate into nothing. Mom would hate to know I intend to stick her in a nursing home, especially after hearing my stories about work, how nurses pin patients down, shove pills into their mouths, and then massage their gullets like ducks for the table. But that’s why I save money. It’ll be nice, her and Dad’s place. All the rooms will have windows and the staff will actually care about their patients. They will give my parents proper baths.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, I stare at my plate of plain rice. Since becoming Ma Eng’s full-time nurse, I’ve had nightmares of Somaly, nightmares I haven’t experienced since I was a kid. Most mornings I now wake up gasping for air. I know these nightmares aren’t real, that they’re only dreams, that they aren’t based on fact or anyone’s actual life. Still, I feel as though I’m being drowned by the past, by Somaly’s memories, her torrent of unresolved emotions, which burrow deeper inside my body with my every restless night.

  The dreams are horrible—Somaly working in the rice fields, pregnant and starving, her unborn child already lacking the nourishment it’ll need; Somaly’s water breaking in the darkest hour of the night and Ma Eng covering her mouth so the screams of labor won’t carry over to the ears of the Khmer Rouge soldiers, then Somaly muffling her newborn’s mouth so that nobody will catch the crying, cooing into its ears, Sorry, sorry, sorry. Some dreams I’m Somaly, and pregnant with her daughter, Maly, my cousin and Ma Eng’s other grandniece. It never makes sense, as Maly wasn’t born until the late eighties. But the dreams strike me like real life, as I desperately try to protect the hungry fetus kicking the walls of my womb, this baby abandoned with me, this doomed daughter whose weight feels both too heavy to easily bear and too light to be any kind of healthy, or secure, or whole. I suffer the consequences of the indispensable rage that Somaly harbored toward her then husband—who actually did flee the country without his wife, even as she was pregnant with what would’ve been Maly’s older sibling, had Somaly not miscarried. This rage surges through my veins, fueling my will to survive my hellish and haunted subconscious, and then, when I am awake and working, it continues to flare up in me, inducing migraines that color my sight with resentment. I don’t blame Ma Eng for the return of these dreams, but I can’t possibly endure them for much longer.

  In other dreams, I’m watching Somaly as if I’m her reflection. On rare occasions—when I eat too much rice, maybe—Somaly and I will have a conversation at her old apartment on Greensboro Way, over a dinner of, yes, heaps of white rice. Usually these occasions involve Somaly telling my future, as if reading from a fortune cookie. But one dream, in particular, stays with me.

  The dream unfolds: Somaly and I are sitting at a dinner table. She wears a white sampot covered in jewels perfectly matching her necklace. She’s almost akin to an apsara in a painting—aggressively elegant, like at any second, she’ll bend her hands backward to her wrists, and sway. I watch her raise the rice to her mouth, grain by grain, pinching each speck between her index finger and thumb. After a while, she stops and studies me, without focusing her eyes, as though I were a large expanse of nothing. My daughter, she finally says, will inherit the golden chain hugging my neck. I don’t say it’s the same necklace I wore as a kid, the one I was given to celebrate our connection.

  It’s been in my family for generations, she explains. Maly’s grandfather refused to let the Communists take his wealth. And that’s why he died. Because everyone knew the Rice Factory King buried things. My father wanted too much. He wanted his wife and his mistress, his wealth. He died because he wanted, wanted, wanted. Let this chain remind Maly of that.

  I wake up right as Somaly removes the necklace and hands it over to me. In every reoccurring version of this same dream, I never find out what Somaly says next.

  From the other room, I hear the opening credits to Deal or No Deal. I splash soy sauce onto my rice, as I’m too exhausted for dreams of Somaly. I know it won’t work, but it’s worth a try.

  Sometimes in the morning, Ma Eng remembers that Somaly is dead. The sight of me shocks her into tears. She starts praying for me to bless her and her grandnephews and grandnieces, of whom I am one. Then she asks what I—or rather the ghost of Somaly—want from the living world, why I’ve appeared before her mortal eyes. In these moments, I s
ee my resemblance to Somaly, to that woman in the few surviving photos. My reflection, in the wardrobe’s mirror, zeroes in on my cheekbones, my dark hair both wavy and straight, how my eyebrows settle into an expression of blankness. Whenever Ma Eng sees me as dead, a ghost, I plead for her to take her medication without a fight. By the time the afternoon comes, Ma Eng will have reverted to hallucinations of war and genocide. Communists lurk behind the curtain. The plants by the window sprawl into “rice fields.” Ma Eng waters those plants like she’ll get beaten to death if she doesn’t.

  This morning, I don’t know which I’d prefer—for Ma Eng to think I am Somaly as living or dead. A woman enslaved by Communists or a ghost haunting her Ming. But when I get to work, it doesn’t matter. Right after I knock on Room 34’s door, a man’s voice answers, “Come in, goddamn it. Come in!”

  I rush into the room to find Ma Eng’s grandnephew, Ves, struggling to pull her up by the wrists, up from the floor. “Hurry and help me!” he shouts.

  “Stop,” I say, “you’ll yank her arm from its socket!” Crouching, I grab on to Ma Eng, wrapping around her waist, and lift her to the bed, where she coils instantly into a fetal position. She doesn’t look good. Her eyelids flutter. Her mouth stretches wider and wider, sounding out only silence.

  “I glanced at my texts for a second and she fell to the ground,” Ves says, pacing back and forth, hands on his head. Ignoring him, I raise Ma Eng’s nightgown to examine the damage. I gently prod her flesh, and her entire body spasms. The wrinkles on her face become the ripples of agony, the echoes of her silent screaming. A pang of relief digs into my gut—uncontrollable and selfish and rotten—and I have to lean against the bed frame, my face nearly touching Ma Eng’s. The thought of her dying spins violently in my head.