Hungry Hearts

by Elsie Chapman

  * * *

  Like most people, I don’t remember the exact moment when I became aware of my mortality. The knowledge came to me early in childhood, I’m sure, but was relegated to some nebulous future thing I wouldn’t have to worry about for a long time. Since the day of the swim, though, it has been hard to forget. Every time I look at my brothers and remember that they were born at a time when bombs were falling, and how fragile the human body is. Every time I remember the swim, and how one prolonged cramp could have pulled me under and ended things. A mere mention of the stars and how they would take millions of lifetimes to reach.

  Some days there are panic attacks and the inevitable sink into oblivion, moments when all I can do is picture what it will be like to not exist, what it will be like to give back this life I’ve been granted. Other days it is just a quiet hum in the back of my mind, a frequency that I can tune out if nothing calls attention to it, and which I can escape with a number of distractions—books, television, conversation.

  But the hum has gotten progressively louder, and the panic attacks more frequent. Miljan and Radan had started noticing the way I would get up quietly and go to the bathroom until an episode would pass, noticed me never taking my headphones off. When it started happening at work more and more, I knew that I couldn’t keep going this way.

  I have had a good life. The one thing that I wanted to change was simply knowledge, the same knowledge everyone else had. The knowledge that others seemed to be able to live with but which had constantly frozen me, which had repeatedly marred my otherwise fortunate life. Death would wipe everything away. I didn’t even want to defeat death; I just wanted that knowledge gone.

  * * *

  It was easy to find the Swede’s writing in my little notebook. He’d used a red pen, and his neat penmanship stood out starkly against my scrawling thoughts in black-inked Serbian—Qing Xian Yuan. My cure, maybe, the catalyst for this whole trip.

  At first I was sure the guy had been drunk or on something stronger. The stuff he was saying. Then curiosity got the best of me, and I googled the city of Rowbury, found that blog post. It was written by a Dr. Ishq, detailing all the rumored magical restaurants in the district. The tone had been lighthearted, but there seemed to be real legends surrounding the place and its food. I’d found a review site called Served and a list of exactly how many places there were in the neighborhood.

  That led to a descent into the Internet wormhole: reviews, more blog posts, the most far-fetched corners of the Internet, where conspiracies blossomed. I don’t know why the Swede chose to highlight the dim-sum place out of all the others, or why I didn’t close out of the all-too-many Internet browser tabs and focus on something productive and rational. I kept at it for over a week, until suddenly a plan formed. I’d use my savings to travel. I’d start in the US, a country I’d previously had no interest in. I’d go to this one place first, and then, perhaps, hopefully, I could see the world and be in the world in a way I had never before.

  In the morning, when those thoughts I hated surfaced, the theory of magical restaurants was how I kept them at a background hum instead of a full-fledged attack on my day. When waiting for the tourists to unload from the cruise, as if the boat were puking them up, the theory was how I kept myself from falling into oblivion. Magical food. A cure. The thought that I could simply wish away my fear was too tempting to ignore.

  “All food is magical, of course,” the Swede had said in his near-perfect English, a slick smile on his face, like he’d used the line before. “This is something else, though.”

  In Kotor, I would wake up and be surrounded by beauty. In the evenings before I disappeared back into home, I was looking out at beauty. The mountains were there; the water was there. In the summer the tourists were everywhere, and many of them were beautiful too. The cats that walked the city, lapping at milk that everyone left out for them, they were beautiful. My country’s history, not so much. There was ugliness there, and there is still ugliness around in the world now. In this country too, where they sweep their past so desperately under the carpet like so much dust.

  I was lucky to be in my little pocket of beauty in Kotor, lucky to be in that pocket of the country, that pocket of time, that pocket of my family. All three (country, time, family) had experienced much more ugliness, and probably much less beauty. Yet my thoughts superimposed death over all of it. Everyone else seemed to be able to live without the constant awareness, and I wanted Qing Xian Yuan to wipe it clean. I wanted to be able to embrace my good fortune, the way my brothers had.

  * * *

  I noticed a tendril of steam rising a few tables over, followed it down to a large bowl of soup. A group of three Asian guys about my age, maybe a little older, were using chopsticks to pull things out of the bowl, or alternately dipping some unrecognizable morsel back in, letting the juices drip for a second, then popping it into their mouths.

  One of them closed his eyes for a moment as he chewed, his tongue darting out slightly to lick his lips. He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was going through, a small golden hoop in his ear dangling with the motion. Was it magic being granted, or just simple joy?

  When the waiter came by, I pointed at the soup the guys were eating and said, “I want that.”

  “You sure, man? It’s spicy.”

  The word made me pause. I looked down at the electronic tablet again and shrugged.

  “It’s a soup, yeah?”

  “No, man. It’s not a soup. You don’t want some dim sum or something instead?”

  He offered no clues as to what dim sum might be. I felt my stomach lurch. “Yes?” I tried to laugh it off. “I’ll take the not-soup, and one dim sum.”

  The waiter chuckled again and motioned for my tablet. “How about some soup dumplings?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Pork or shrimp?”

  I remembered reading a series of tweets from someone who’d come to Hungry Heart Row and, after eating pork tamales, swore that their wishes kept coming true. “Pork.”

  The waiter tapped on the screen a few times and then bolted away toward another table in the back. I was left with the din of the restaurant. Music playing softly from somewhere, the clink of chopsticks and spoons. People gathered around the hostess stand, talking, looking at their phones. I could hardly believe where I was in the world, and why. So many people in Kotor never exited a two-hundred-kilometer radius of the world.

  Although that was probably true of people in the restaurant, too, true of most human beings. They stayed within their limited lives. Even I had done it for most of my life and was lucky now to be in a different corner of the world, experiencing new and exciting things. My appreciation should not be dependent on magic. It should not be dependent on forgetting death. And yet.

  I examined the sauce bottles at the edge of the table and poured some out into the little container in front of me. I stuck my pinky in the dark liquid, gave it a sniff then a lick. It wasn’t soy sauce, which was maybe the only legitimately Asian thing I’d ever eaten, so I didn’t know what it was at all.

  To my right there was a black kid taking out these little pockets of food from one of three bamboo steamers and taking notes as he ate, big, clunky headphones covering his ears. To my left a couple in business attire scrolled through their phones and took distracted sips from tiny ceramic teacups. I poured a different sauce directly onto my pinky finger this time, tasted nothing but heat. I coughed and scrambled for a sip of cold water. The black kid looked up at me, lifting one half of his headphones slightly off his ear. “You okay?”

  I was about to simply nod and smile and return to my thoughts, but then I felt the urge for more. I thought: The next few months there’ll be none of Miljan and Radan. No parents, no friends to provide the conversations that could get my mind off death. No Swedes or tourists coming off in hordes from their cruises. No constant companionship of the cats in Kotor, which were mostly strays but not quite homeless, since everyone in town treated ea
ch cat as their own. Just me and my thoughts. If I let them in, they’d be my only company.

  I took a gulp of water, tried to act as American cool as possible. “Yeah. It’s just we don’t have this level of spice where I’m from.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Montenegro,” I said, almost like a question. I had assumptions about Americans hearing about foreigners, prepared for their defensiveness and hostility at once, especially since I sound like a drunken Russian when I speak English. But I wasn’t quite sure how that applied to black Americans, who were viewed like foreigners in their own land. Even I knew that, though Americans liked to sweep that under the carpet. “Next to Serbia.”

  The boy smirked. “I know where it is. I took a geography quiz once and got one seventy-five out of one hundred.”

  “How’d you do in math?”

  He laughed, and a knot that had been forming in my stomach the more my thoughts raged now eased. If death couldn’t be wished away, this would be my other request: to find conversations like these, strangers who offered at least the prospect of momentary forgetfulness. That was the only thing that worked when the episodes started coming at work, at school, at home. At school, I got in trouble when an episode came during a test and I started talking to the girl sitting next to me. I got a few bad reviews from tourists saying I was “uncomfortably chatty,” and my boss had to warn me to stick to facts and rehearsed anecdotes. I tried to talk to the tourists, tried to talk to Miljan and Radan, who were suspicious of the new behavior.

  “That was good, man.” The kid looked down at his notebook, then a silence fell between us. The restaurant was loud with chatter, but it still felt like silence. Silence always brought back the thoughts. And the moment of his laughter was now gone, returned to the universe.

  The kid bit his lip, then grabbed the pen resting by his plate and jotted something down. He kept his headphone slightly off, though, a faint thump of music reaching me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, pointing at the notebook.

  He tapped his pen against the edge of the table. “This? No, it’s nothing, just a little research.” He waved his hand at the notebook as if he could make it disappear, laid his arms over it. “What brings you to town?”

  When I’d told my parents I was leaving, my dad smiled and nodded like he knew it was coming. Mom cried a little but kept it together, muttering jokes about how it had been a mistake to let me work for the cruise companies. They were sure that I was never going to come back, and I almost told them that if I discovered the fear of mortality did not follow me, I might stay gone. I’d laid out my plans instead, to give them some details to hang on to.

  “America? Why there?” Dad had said. “I thought you were interested in speaking Spanish.”

  What could I have said? I’m afraid of death wiping me out, and there’s a restaurant that might help with that? “Cheap flight,” I’d said with a shrug. “I won’t stay there long.” Then I dived into a list of places I wanted to go, distracted them and myself from the reason for this first stop.

  My parents and I did not talk about the bombs or the days without food; we did not talk about fears or mortality. The only time I had ever told anyone was when Miljan found me outside the house, just a few weeks before the Swede. I was curled up on the concrete dock by the bay, almost catatonic, unable to shake the oblivion from my mind. He’d had to shake me for five minutes before I came to and admitted what had happened. Since that day he’d looked at me like I was damaged, cracking jokes about death constantly.

  I thought of going down the path of distraction again with the kid sitting next to me. It was my one imperfect weapon. To force my brain to focus on something else. It only worked for spurts at a time, which was why I loved the summers in Kotor, being distracted by the tourists. It’s why I listened to podcasts and music and dove into the Internet as often as possible. There was always something ready to pull me back toward death, though—a song lyric, an anecdote about a dead grandparent, the mere mention of a disease. I could make up some other answer instead of the truth, since thinking about the cure was in a way thinking about death too.

  But then I thought of how the moment would be gone soon, how quickly I’d have to hand it back to the constantly taking universe. The universe which had almost taken away my brothers and my parents, the universe which took day in and day out, which could have taken me during my swim or during a million other instances. And I thought that I’d had enough of keeping death to myself.

  The kid slid the headphones completely off, looping them around his neck. I decided to extend the moment as long as possible by opening up. I leaned in and confessed. “I heard this food grants wishes.”

  The kid smirked. “Word of that got all the way to Montenegro, huh.”

  “It’s true, then?”

  At that instant the waiter came by with a bamboo steamer and set it down in front of me. “Pork soup dumplings,” he said simply, then walked away. I removed the lid, saw six nearly translucent pockets of white dough sitting in steam.

  I looked over at the kid, who offered another smirk and said, “You’ll have to tell me.”

  “Okay, I will.” I examined the dumplings. “First, can you tell me how to eat this?”

  The boy laughed and then gave me a demonstration with his own dumplings, running me through what each of the sauces was, how you could bite off the top of the dumpling so that the steam would get out and the insides wouldn’t be as hot as molten lava.

  “And when do I make the wish? It’s like birthday candles?”

  “I don’t know if there’s a science to that part.”

  I grabbed the chopsticks, liking the unfamiliar feel of them in my hand. “I can’t believe I’m here,” I said, more to myself than to my temporary companion.

  * * *

  “Soul food that’ll make you feel whatever the chef wants you to feel,” the Swede had said. “A Filipino restaurant that can turn your luck, a Mexican bakery that’ll make you love.” He’d lit a cigarette then, exhaled slowly. We’d been sitting on a bench by Old Town, a pink sunset lighting up the Bay of Kotor. The mountains majestic as always, the water still as a mirror. The Swede had insisted on buying me a beer, and we sat there talking while the tourists meandered back toward their cruise ship. “There are few places in the world that are truly magical. Trust me—I’ve been around. That place? The food?” He waved his hand like he was shooing away a fly. “Changed my life.”

  * * *

  “Cheers,” I said to the kid, then managed to pick up the dumpling with the chopsticks. For the first one I bypassed the sauces, wanting to taste it as is. I didn’t want to dilute the magic, if it existed. It wobbled a little in my unsteady hand, but then I plopped it onto the large spoon like the kid had showed me. I stared at the dumpling, an imperfect white blob with a liquid hidden within. What a strange, fanciful journey I was on, chasing a thing human beings had not ever been granted.

  Although, fuck, what did I know about what human beings had been granted. I lived in Kotor my whole life, a beautiful little corner of the world, where the Adriatic was a blue mirror, and cats licked cream from any bowl they pleased. The way everyone else went about their lives, complaining about what they did, it often felt like I was the only one persistently thinking about death, while everyone else worried about responsibilities and money and sex. My friends at home, the tourists parading around town in their khaki shorts and tucked-in polos, none of them seemed to worry about this cloud hanging over all our heads. None of them had panic attacks when they squished mosquitoes against their skin, none of them were ever paralyzed by their own thoughts. Or maybe they were and were just as good as I was at hiding it. Maybe the only way I was alone in this was in thinking I was alone.

  I tipped the spoon and slipped the dumpling into my mouth whole and closed my eyes.

  The first sensation was heat. The steam built up against my palate, and I opened my mouth to let it out, shielding other diners from the sight with my ha
nd. A little disappointing to have a feeling rather than a flavor jump out first. I tried not to hold it against the food, let the steam waft out. Then I chewed, waiting for a telling tingle of magic. I scoured my mind, hoping to already be rid of the knowledge.

  The broth inside the dumpling spilled out into my mouth, instantly scalding my tongue. I’d forgotten to bite the top off, and now my taste buds were melting or burning away, or whatever happened to taste buds when they came into contact with a hot liquid. My eyes shot open, and I started mumbling curses in Serbian, causing the broth to dribble down my chin.

  I reached for a napkin and looked over at the black kid to see if he or anyone else had noticed that I was making a fool out of myself.

  My table neighbor was looking away, but there was a slight smile on his lips that made me think he hadn’t missed the spectacle and was just being kind. I made eye contact with my waiter, who was standing by the door to the kitchen and laughing in a way that made me feel without a doubt that it was at me. I felt myself flush with embarrassment and anger, followed immediately by the recognition that I would take this embarrassment and anger any day, any minute, if it overtook my worries about death, if the dumplings had worked.

  I paused, waiting to see if my thoughts would start to tumble down in that direction, if just wishing for a cure would send me into my trip’s first full-on paralysis. Then I thought: You are not alone in this.

  “I forgot to do the biting-the-top-off thing,” I said to the kid.

  “I wasn’t gonna bring it up. Happens to everyone.”

  “Why is burning your taste buds the worst feeling in the world?” I said, scowling and making a show of how weird my tongue felt at the moment, trying to sell the fact that I believed what I’d just said.

  “At least now you can wish your tongue a speedy recovery.”

  I laughed. “How does food-wishing work in America, anyway? I know how it works in Montenegro, obviously,” I joked. “But I forgot to research this. Do I get, like, one wish per meal? One per food item?”