by Simon Han
“God . . . damn,” Patty said, as the producers cut off the coach’s voice.
She was pretty sure Mr. MBA Brent knew she had a family. When he’d passed her on his way out, an hour ago, he’d teasingly ordered her to go home. Darrell, the cleaning guy, certainly did—evenings when he found her still at work, he’d remind her with aggressive good cheer that her kids were hungry, and maybe he needed to have a talk with the boss man on her behalf. Was it possible that her team in Bangalore did not know she had a family? Soon after they’d begun working together in July, she remembered, she had told them about leaving Tianjin at twenty-four. But had she mentioned whom she’d left behind? They knew about the master’s from the University of Houston, but not the PhD she’d lost after funding dried up and she was forced to apply for industry jobs in order to ensure Jack would get his visa. Did she tell them that as a student she’d helped develop a method for transferring electric energy from a power source to an electric load through nothing but an electromagnetic field? She’d powered a 40-watt lightbulb from a meter away, without a wire. If she got them on the phone right now, would they care to hear about that?
She pictured them now, on the other side of the world. Brilliant men kissing their wives and sons and daughters good-bye, the taste of dosa and filtered kaapi still on their lips as they rushed to catch the company shuttle before morning gridlock. They would be making their way to fancy tech parks, with perfectly proportioned lakes and honeycombed offices, while Patty was the one crawling back to her family, mile after congested mile. All those nights, while she nodded off during Annabel’s one hundred kisses, Raj and Karl and Chethan and Pranav would have been leaning back in their ergonomic chairs, their leather shoes propped up on the table next to a computer screen filling up with algorithms and 32-bit numbers, preparing themselves for the conference call they were going to have with her after she woke up. While Annabel clamped her teeth on Patty’s lips and refused to let go, they would be in their office cafeteria biting down on the thigh of a freshly roasted chicken and laughing about the fart the office administrator had let out down the hall before she’d made it to the bathroom. The next day Patty would snap awake. Four thirty a.m. No alarms, just reflex, seconds to reboot. A mumbling Liang and ragged-breathed Annabel turning onto their sides, reaching across the space she’d vacated. She’d be the first to nose out of the garage, and in her cubicle under the commercial ceiling tiles and timed fluorescent lights that had not yet activated, would connect to Texas Semi’s long-distance bridge a couple hours before her Bangalore team would leave for the day.
In Patty’s car, the phone was ringing. She picked up without looking at the screen.
“This is Patty,” she said.
“I know. I called you,” said a voice in Mandarin.
“Oh. I thought. Never mind.”
“It’s six fifteen,” Liang said.
The clock on the dashboard read 6:22 p.m., but there was no need to correct Liang. Over the phone, her husband sounded like someone from the past. A recording.
“Did you receive my email?”
“Mm-hmm. You are not waiting to eat, right? The traffic. There was an accident—”
“An accident.”
She had turned down the radio to a murmur by then. The air in the car tasted metallic. Had there been an accident, or had she imagined the radio saying that? “Six-car pileup, I heard. I should reach it soon. The ambulance is stuck behind me somewhere.”
“Annabel asked me today why you’re never here in the morning,” Liang said. “She dreams you never come back from India.”
“India. What can she know about India?”
“Don’t you understand? She believes that every night, after she falls asleep, you fly away to India. And we ask ourselves why she won’t sleep alone.”
She wanted to remind Liang that their efforts to get their daughter to sleep alone had been halfhearted at best. The three of them had simply moved from sleeping together on their bed downstairs to squeezing onto Annabel’s bed upstairs. Was it Annabel who was making them stick to her? One day, she wanted to remind Liang, their daughter would be fine sleeping on her own. Would they?
Liang persisted: “Should I tell her Māma is going to be home late from India, too?”
Tell her Māma is late for a reason, Patty could say. She had finally graduated from peripheral I/O templates to something bigger. No, it was not a revolutionary study into the wireless transmission of electricity, but she and her team were teaching a digital signal processor, or DSP, to convert elaborate mathematical calculations into basic operations, translating algorithms faster than before in order to power Motorola’s newest, sleekest flip phone. As the system architect, it was up to Māma to corral them multiple times a week for clusterfucks, so that they could work out how to design an engine that, beyond processing information, communicated like a brain, one that sent messages to data memory and I/O ports and the outside world, realizing a fully functioning body. One day she would tell Annabel all of that.
“Tell me, Qīng-Qīng.” Liang took a long breath. “Are you still at work?”
“I told you, the traffic—”
“The traffic.”
Accident. Traffic. Words Liang repeated as if they meant something entirely different to him. And maybe they did. He was no longer the man who, upon a chance assignment from a client, lugged lenses and tripods and reflectors from Tianjin to Beijing to photograph a dying woman who’d put on makeup she couldn’t afford so her husband could properly grieve her image when she was gone. No longer the man who drove their Volvo beyond the urban knots of Texas to places where he was the sole Chinese person anyone had ever seen, so he could get paid in cash to photograph backyard weddings and fifty-person homecomings. His windowless studio was ten minutes from their house in Plano. He was more building manager than photographer these days, with most of the business, as Patty had predicted, coming from high school girls who rented the rooms after school, posing with the wedding-photo-booth-style props and taking their own pictures with the remote-controlled cameras. At first Liang had resisted her suggestions to rebrand, but after she’d taken him through the wringer of private school and college planning seminars and dangled the threat of quitting her job so she could properly raise Annabel, he’d relented. Before long he was doubling down on his new role, using the money they were supposed to save to hire assistants for weekday shifts, only going in some weekends for the rare assignment. More time for the children, he’d reasoned, borrowing the words Patty had once used to convince him.
“Where is this traffic?” he said now, over the phone.
Hǔfù hǔzǐ, so why couldn’t Liang be more like Jack? Their jīn gǒu would ask her with genuine interest where or why she was going, where or how she had been, and when she would smile or sigh and say, “Work,” her avid young watcher of CNN would release her from his stare, as if the word weighed enough, as if he could hold all of work or debt or mass destruction in his palm. She spoke to her son with words that felt big, meant little. In spite of this, he did not ask her for more. He did not ask, Patty wanted to believe, because he understood his mother—understood, somehow, that she could hold only so much. Even a spoon felt heavy, coming home from another day that proved both utterly predictable and out of her control. Their years apart had made the boy profound, enough so that he offered the generosity of his caution. He did not press her the way his father did, did not demand explanation or assurance. Did not ask her in the morning what she’d been dreaming about, as if he expected her to say, “Well, you.”
Better not to dream, she wanted to tell Liang sometimes. You should know this better than anyone. But Liang’s sleep troubles were finally a thing of the past, and they had not talked about them for years. In Plano, they talked about growth opportunities. About the DSP, for instance, that one-inch-by-one-inch microchip that unlocked user speeds never before possible. Promotions, cubicles with doors, offices w
ith windows, corner offices with windows. A guest room, a mortgage, a new SUV, a lawyer to recover the lost green card application that had made it too risky to fly back to China even for a visit, to hold her parents’ and brothers’ hands once more. The DSP was the future. It gave her a reason not to look back.
Somewhere ahead on 75, an ambulance wailed. A real one, this time. Patty strained to hear it over the honking, the memories, over Liang’s voice on the phone, Qīng-Qīng. The email . . .
Honking.
Honking, behind her.
“Cars are moving now, have to go,” she said, and hung up before Liang could say more about the email. She straightened up in her seat, nudged the Tahoe forward, filling in less than ten feet of concrete. Behind her, the man in the Lexus braked, hard. She watched in the rearview mirror as he punched the steering wheel and slapped the dashboard. Maybe Liang was doing something similar now, with the phone that sat on the kitchen counter.
“What do I do?” she said aloud, imagining bringing the problem to her Bangalore team. What do I do about my family?
Who? they would ask. And she would ask herself the same question. Who were these people she lived with, and what did they do when she was not there? Perhaps Annabel was hopping from chair to chair around the kitchen table, knocking over chopsticks and bowls, using Māma’s absence as an excuse not to eat her bok choy and mushrooms. Jack, on the other hand, would be racing to finish his food, always pitted against a competitor who wasn’t there, his head hanging over his bowl, a head too large for his neck, a boy whose body had grown into solidity before proportionality. And Liang: he would be staring outside, as if a clock were pinned to the sky. His wife was not only late, but late again.
It was Patty who had emailed Liang first, earlier in the afternoon, to tell him that she might be late. She’d remembered he was going to play poker with his friends in the evening, and reassured him that she would be back in time for him to go. They didn’t need to wait on her for dinner. They didn’t need to worry about her at all.
He’d emailed back, almost immediately:
I wonder I should forget poker. I mean: I wonder I should not go. Maybe you don’t want me go? I don’t know, I mean, how you feel every time I go. I see the real you when I come back. Like I did something wrong, like my smiling and good time made you have bad time. I mean: I wonder it would be better for you I stay home.
I feel I have not seen you for so long, even we live in same house, share same bed. Sometime, I wake up, don’t remember where you are. I know Annabel’s bed is small. But I think Qing-Qing—maybe problem is, Annabel is problem. I mean: problem is we sharing ourselves with her. At her age Annabel should sleep in her own bed, yes, but also by herself—this is what teachers say. Maybe tonight, we sleep downstairs, just us.
I know you have long day. So maybe you wish you have our nice big bed downstairs, for yourself. I mean: maybe you wish I am not there. But . . . maybe not. Maybe you wish you can be with me, just me, so we can sleep like we sleep before, remember? With our back turn to each other, your foot touch my foot, like you want to make sure I am there. I mean: I want to sleep like this, with you. Knowing you are there. Even I wake up and you are gone, knowing: you are there.
What do you think? Drive safe.
Best Regards,
Liang Cheng
YOUR Home Studios
“Fun Self-Portraits, One Click Away!”
It was the longest email she could remember Liang sending her in years, stumbling in both directions as if he could not pause to think through the words, could not press backspace, as if they were back in Tianjin, and he were penning one of the frantic letters he’d sent her days after he’d taken pictures of her graduating class on the front steps of the Nankai University administrative building. He was Chéng Liàng then, the fidgety and handsome photographer her school had hired. Patty had walked up to him after the session, because she hadn’t liked the way he’d rushed through it. She suspected her eyes were closed for most of the shots.
How little he must think of their graduation, she said to him. Did he think they’d accomplished nothing? Earlier she’d noticed Liang’s strong build, the sturdy air about him, but once she got going he looked upon her with fear, as if it were she who’d hired him. He did not protest when she went back with him to his studio, nearly an hour away from the university, a run-down former accounting office with one room converted into a darkroom. He shared it with three other men, all of whom had gone home by the time she and Liang arrived. She realized, as Liang began hanging up the developing photographs, that for him this was home. Off to the side of his makeshift office was a daybed, no bigger than the folding cot tucked away in her parents’ closet. The studio smelled like sweat. She took a cigarette from Liang and he did not say anything when she fumbled with the lighter.
It was her first cigarette. She had a second, a third, a fourth. They talked about her studies. Her high marks. Her less successful brothers. How the eldest had taken the two-hour bus to Tiananmen two summers ago, in order to sit among the protestors. How he came home before the blood began to flow, relaying tales of students driven to hunger strikes, of pop stars from Taiwan sleeping in the tents among the people, of speeches that made the hairs on his already-balding head stand up. She told Liang stories that were really her brother’s stories because she had not been there, had opted to be a student who went to school, who paved a future for herself by memorizing the equations that governed the world, not by sitting on baked concrete and bickering with other students about which songs to sing for the cameras. She went on talking in Liang’s studio, learning nothing about him except that he nodded and agreed and made the way she saw the world seem less ridiculous.
She realized, after they began kissing, that she was going to miss the last bus. My parents will think I am dead. The thought gave her a little thrill, until she remembered that the man she was now straddling was someone who could make that true. What did she know? Liang could have been anyone.
She tried to lift the hem of his shirt. He patted her hand away. He let her kiss him some more, but did not offer more. Would a killer be so shy? Would a killer be hesitant to be touched? All her life she had trusted, above all, herself. That night she took the lead, and though their clothes did not come off, she told him when to kiss her, where to touch her, until they fell asleep and she could not tell him what to do any longer. When he later woke in a sweat, his hands thrashing the air above them, she trusted that this new feeling that now seized her was not fear but concern, a desperate concern that was a close cousin to love. Here was a person who needed help, and here she was, helping him. She held down Liang’s arms as best she could, held them as he swatted and even swung at her, though he missed. Chéng Liàng, she called to him. Chéng Liàng, the way her mother would state her brothers’ names when she was angry. Chéng. Liàng. Perhaps it was in that naming that he recognized himself, and who was calling him—and he stopped.
The next morning, Liang could not recall what had happened, but he piled on apology after apology. In his letters, in the spaces between more apologies and appreciations, he professed his love to her—how indebted he was to her, how humbled before her, how he would do whatever it took to make her time with him more comfortable. At no point did he say It will never happen again, and she was grateful for that honesty. Among the nights to follow there would be, on occasion, another sleepless one. Sometimes, Liang would keep waking up; other times, he’d groan or even shout. She wondered if he had ever slept with another person before her. At night, she became his harness and his witness, the one to tell him what had happened, and who he had been when it happened. The initial thrill of keeping the nights a secret from her parents faded. In its place, a mission, one not unlike the studies on electrical currents she hoped to conduct in graduate school: she wanted to know the unknowable, to know it so intimately she could not only tend to it but master it.
Now here she was, stuck i
n traffic and avoiding Liang’s emails. Patty had wished desperately to share his response with anyone in the cubicles around her. She’d imagined copying and pasting the last section and sending it to her Bangalore team with the subject line, “Thoughts, gentlemen?” But people were already filing home, one by one, two by two, until it was only her and Darrell the cleaning guy, reminding her of the time.
There was one thing Patty liked about driving, and it was why she did not mind going to work early, or even driving into traffic on the way home. She could be away from her email. The car was a space where she could be free of the work she’d left and the work that awaited her. Because it was work, to decipher who her husband was, and what he wanted.
She looked in the rearview mirror. “Thoughts, gentlemen?” she said aloud.
But she could not imagine an answer to the question.
* * *
• • •
For the next hour, she floated along with the crowd, watching the sun come down. The man in the Lexus behind her massaged his head. Rooms in the surrounding hotels came to life and business travelers pulled back their curtains. Maybe traffic in Dallas looked beautiful from up there, Patty thought. A gold bracelet of lights, turned ever so slightly around the wrist. The wave of cars crawled past the invisible lines of subdivisions, municipalities, cities, counties, electoral districts she didn’t know could be redrawn or why.
At 7:35, traffic began to thin.
There seemed no reason for it. Five lanes had contracted into four, yet the pace was picking up. The ambulance had passed, but there was no indication of an accident anywhere. When she turned the radio back up, it had moved on to stock market chatter.