by Nicola Yoon
I read guilt on his face. He takes a step toward me, but I back up.
He stops moving.
“You’re just waiting for someone to save you. Don’t want to be a doctor? Don’t be a doctor, then.”
“It’s not that simple,” he says quietly.
I narrow my eyes at him. “To quote you from five minutes ago. Here’s how you do it: You open your mouth and say what’s true. ‘Mom and Dad? I don’t want to be a doctor,’ you say. ‘I want to be a poet because I am stupid and don’t know better,’ you say.”
“You know it’s not that easy,” he says, even quieter than before.
I tug on the straps on my backpack. It’s time to go. We’re just delaying the inevitable. “You know what I hate?” I ask. “I really hate poetry.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says.
“Shut up. I hate it, but I read something once by a poet named Warsan Shire. It says that you can’t make a home out of human beings, and that someone should’ve told you that.”
I expect him to tell me that the sentiment is not true. I even want him to, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Your brother was right. There’s no place for this to go. Besides, you don’t love me, Daniel. You’re just looking for someone to save you. Save yourself.”
Area Teen Convinced That His Life Is Complete and Utter Shit
How I want her to be right. How I want not to be falling in love with her at all.
I watch her walk away, and I don’t stop her or follow her. What an absolute idiot I’ve been. I’ve been acting like some mystical, crystal-worshiping dummy. Of course this is what’s happening now. All this nonsensical talk about fate and destiny and meant-to-be.
Natasha’s right. Life is just a series of dumb decisions and indecisions and coincidences that we choose to ascribe meaning to. School cafeteria out of your favorite pastry today? It must be because the universe is trying to keep you on your diet.
Thanks, Universe!
You missed your train? Maybe the train’s going to explode in the tunnel, or Patient Zero for some horrible bird flu (waterfowl, goose, pterodactyl) is on that train, and thank goodness you weren’t on it after all.
Thanks, Universe!
No one bothers to follow up with destiny, though. The cafeteria just forgot there was another box in the back, and you got a slice of cake from your friend anyway. You fumed while waiting for another train, but one came along eventually. No one died on the train you missed. No one so much as sneezed.
We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we’re just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don’t mean anything.
FATE HAS ALWAYS BEEN the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it.
In ancient Greek mythology, the Three Sisters of Fate spin out a person’s destiny within three nights of their birth. Imagine your newborn child in his nursery. It’s dark and soft and warm, somewhere between two and four a.m., one of those hours that belong exclusively to the newly born or the dying.
The first sister—Clotho—appears next to you. She’s a maiden, young and smooth. In her hands she holds a spindle, and on it she spins the threads of your child’s life.
Next to her is Lachesis, older and more matronly than her sister. In her hands, she holds the rod used to measure the thread of life. The length and destiny of your child’s life is in her hands.
Finally we have Atropos—old, haggardly. Inevitable. In her hands she holds the terrible shears she’ll use to cut the thread of your child’s life. She determines the time and manner of his or her death.
Imagine the awesome and awful sight of these three sisters pressed together, presiding over his crib, determining his future.
In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn’t. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn’t have prevented it? It was always ever thus.
Things happen for a reason, says Natasha’s mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that there’s a Plan.
Natasha is different. She believes in determinism—cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she’s not unlike Daniel’s dad.
Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn’t meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.
But.
Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable.
I’M NOT GOING TO LET this thing with Daniel stop me from going to the museum. This is one of my favorite areas of the city. The buildings here aren’t quite as tall as those in Midtown. It’s nice being able to see patches of uninterrupted sky.
Ten minutes later, I’m in the museum in my favorite section—the Hall of Meteorites. Most people head right through this room to the gemstone one next door, with its flashy precious and semiprecious rocks. But I like this one. I like how dark and cool and spare it is. I like that there’s hardly ever anyone here.
All around the room, vertical cases with shining spotlights display small sections of meteorites. The cases have names like Jewels from Space, Building Planets, and Origins of the Solar System.
I head right over to my favorite of all the meteorites—Ahnighito. It’s actually just a section of the much larger Cape New York meteor. Ahnighito is thirty-four tons of iron and is the largest meteorite on display in any museum. I step up to the platform that it sits on and trail my hands across it. The surface is metal-cold and pockmarked from thousands of tiny impacts. I close my eyes, let my fingers dip in and out of the divots. It’s hard to believe that this hunk of iron is from outer space. Harder still to believe that it contains the origins of the solar system. This room is my church, and standing on this platform is my pillar. Touching this rock is the closest I ever come to believing in God.
This is where I would’ve taken Daniel. I would’ve told him to write poetry about space rocks and impact craters. The sheer number of actions and reactions it’s taken to form our solar system, our galaxy, our universe, is astonishing. The number of things that had to go exactly right is overwhelming.
Compared to that, what is falling in love? A series of small coincidences that we say means everything because we want to believe that our tiny lives matter on a galactic scale. But falling in love doesn’t even begin to compare to the formation of the universe.
It’s not even close.
“Symmetries”
A Poem by Daniel Jae Ho Bae
I will
stay on my
side. And you will
stay on an-
other
MY FATHER AND I WERE close once. In Jamaica, and even after we moved here, we were inseparable. Most times it felt like me and my dad—the Dreamers—against my mom and my brother—the Non-Dreamers.
He and I watched cricket together. I was his audience when he ran lines for auditions. When he was finally a famous Broadway actor, he would get me all the best parts for little girls, he’d say. I listened to his stories about how our life would be after he became famous. I listened long after my mom and brother had stopped listening.
Things started to change about four years ago, when I was thirteen. My mom got sick of living in a one-bedroom apartment. All her friends in Jamaica lived in their own houses. She got sick of my dad working in the same job for basically the same pay. She got sick of hearing what would happen when his ship came in. She never said anything to him, though, only to me.
You children too big to be sleeping in the living room now. You need you privacy.
I never going to have a real kitchen and a real fridge. Is time for him to give up that foolishness now.
And then he lost his job. I don’t know if he was fired or laid off. My mom said once that she thought he quit, but she couldn’t prove it.
On the da
y it happened he said: “Maybe is a blessing in disguise. Give me more time to pursue me acting.”
I don’t know who he was talking to, but no one responded.
Now that he wasn’t working, he said he would audition for roles. But he hardly ever did. There was always an excuse:
Me not right for that part.
Them not going to like me accent, man.
Me getting too old now. Acting is a young man game.
When my mom got home from work in the evening, my father told her he was trying. But my brother and I knew better.
I still remember the first time we saw him disappear into a play. Peter and I had walked home from school. We knew something strange was up because the front door was hanging open. Our father was in the living room—our bedroom. I don’t know if he didn’t hear us come in, but he didn’t react. He was holding a book in his hand. Later I realized it was actually a play—A Raisin in the Sun.
He was wearing a white button-up shirt and slacks and reciting the lines. I’m not sure why he was even holding the play because he already had it memorized. I still remember parts of the monologue. The character said something about seeing his future stretched out in front of him and how it—the future—was just a looming empty space.
When my father finally noticed us watching, he scolded us for sneaking up on him. At first I thought he was just embarrassed. No one likes being caught unawares. Later, though, I realized it was more than that. He was ashamed, as if we’d caught him cheating or stealing.
After that he and I didn’t do much of anything together anymore. He stopped watching cricket. He turned down all my offers to help him memorize lines. His side of my parents’ bedroom grew more cluttered with stacks of used and yellowed paperbacks of famous plays. He knew all the roles, not just the leads but the bit parts as well.
Eventually he stopped with all pretense of auditioning or looking for a job. My mom gave up the pretense that we’d ever own a house or even find an apartment with more than one bedroom. She took extra shifts at work to make ends meet. Last summer, I got a job at McDonald’s instead of volunteering at New York Methodist hospital like I used to.
It’s been over three years of this. We come home from school to find him locked in his bedroom, running lines with no one. His favorite parts are the long, dramatic monologues. He is Macbeth and Walter Lee Younger. He complains bitterly about this or that actor and his lack of skill. He heaps praise on those he judges to be good.
Two months ago, through no fault of his own, he got a part. Someone he’d met years ago during one of his auditions was staging a production of A Raisin in the Sun. When he told my mom, the first thing she asked was “How much you getting paid?”
Not Congratulations. Not I’m so proud of you. Not Which part? or When is it? or Are you so excited? Just How much you getting paid?
She looked at him with flat eyes when she said it. Unimpressed eyes. Tired eyes that had just come off two shifts in a row.
I think we were all a little shocked. She’d even shocked herself. Yes, she’d been frustrated with him for years, but that one moment showed us all how far apart they really were now. Even Peter, who sides with my mother in all things, flinched a little.
Still. You couldn’t fault her. Not really. My father had been dreaming his life away for years. He lived in those plays instead of the real world. He still does. My mother didn’t have time for dreaming anymore.
Neither do I.
HE’S A LITTLE AFRAID OF NATASHA, to be honest. The things she’s interested in now? Chemistry and physics and math. Where did they come from? Sometimes when he looks at her doing her homework at the kitchen table, he thinks she belongs to someone else. Her world is bigger than him and the things he taught her to be interested in. He doesn’t know when she outgrew him.
One night after she and Peter had gone to bed, he went to the kitchen for water. She’d left her math book and homework on the table. Samuel doesn’t know what overcame him, but he turned on the light, sat down, and flipped through the book. It looked like hieroglyphics, like some ancient language left by a time and a people he could never hope to understand. It filled him with a kind of dread. He sat there for a long time, running his fingers over the symbols, wishing his skin were porous enough to let all the knowledge and history of the world in.
After that night, every time he looked at her he had the vague sense that someone had come in when he wasn’t looking and snatched his sweet little girl away.
Sometimes, though, he still catches a glimpse of the old Natasha. She’ll give him a look like she used to when she was younger. It’s a look that wants something from him. A look that wants him to be more, do more, and love more. He resents it. Sometimes he resents her. Hasn’t he done enough already? She’s his first child. He’s already given up all his dreams for her.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO with myself now. I’m supposed to be blowing with the wind, but there’s no wind anymore. I want to get a hobo outfit and a sandwich board and scrawl What now, Universe? across it. Now might be a good time to admit that the universe is not paying attention, though.
It’s fair to say that I hate everything and everyone.
The universe is an asshole, just like Charlie.
Charlie.
That sack of shit.
Charlie, who told my would-be girlfriend that we didn’t stand a chance. Charlie, who accused her of being a shoplifter. Charlie, who told her I had a small dick. Charlie, who I’ve wanted to punch in the face for eleven years now.
Maybe this is the wind. My hate for Charlie.
No time like the present.
I’ve got nothing left to lose today.
THE PARALEGAL IS A LITTLE more rumpled when I see her this time. A lock of her hair is out of place and falls into her eyes. Her eyes are glitter under the fluorescent lights, and her bright red lipstick is gone. She looks like she’s been kissed.
I check my phone to make sure I’m not too early or late, but I’m right on time.
“Welcome back, Ms. Kingsley. Follow me, please.”
She stands and begins walking. “Jeremy—I mean, Mr. Fitz—I mean, Attorney Fitzgerald is just through here.”
She knocks quietly at the only door and waits, eyes even brighter than before.
The door swings open.
I might as well not be standing there, because Attorney Fitzgerald doesn’t see me at all. He looks at his paralegal in a way that makes me want to apologize for intruding. She’s looking at him in the same way.
I clear my throat very loudly.
Finally he drags his eyes away from her. “Thank you, Ms. Winter,” he says. He might as well be declaring his love.
I follow him. He sits down at his desk and presses his fingers against his temples. He’s got a small bandage just above his eyebrow and another around his wrist. He looks like an older and more harried version of the picture on his website. The only things that are the same are that he’s white, and his eyes are bright green.
“Sit sit sit sit,” he says, all in one breath. “Sorry for the delay. I had a little accident this morning, but now we don’t have much time, so please, tell me how this all came to pass.”
I’m not sure where to begin. Should I tell this lawyer the entire history? What should I include? I feel like I need to go back in time to explain it all.
Should I tell him about my father’s aborted dreams? Should I tell him that I think dreams never die even when they’re dead? Should I tell him that I suspect my father lives a better life in his head? In that life, he’s renowned and respected. His kids look up to him. His wife wears diamonds and is the envy of men and women alike.
I would like to live in that world too.
I don’t know where to begin, so I start with the night he ruined our lives.
THE THEATER WAS EVEN SMALLER than Peter and I expected. The sign said MAXIMUM CAPACITY: 40 PEOPLE. Tickets were fifteen dollars each, with the proceeds going to cover the rental of the space for two hours on a Wednesd
ay night. The actors weren’t given complimentary tickets for friends and family, so he had to buy three for us.
My father loves ritual and ceremony but has very few things to be ritualistic or ceremonial about. Now he had this play, and these tickets. He couldn’t help himself. First he went out and picked up Chinese takeout—General Tso’s chicken and shrimp fried rice for everyone.
He sat us all down at the very small table in our kitchen. We never eat at the table, because it’s cramped with more than two people sitting at it. That night, though, he insisted we eat together as a family. He even served us himself, which is a thing that had never happened before. To my mom he said, “See? I got paper plates so you don’t have a bunch of dishes to wash up later.” He said it with a perfect American accent.
My mom didn’t respond. We should’ve taken that as a sign.
As soon as we were done eating, he stood and held a plain white envelope up in the air like it was a trophy.
“Let’s see what we have for dessert,” he said. He made, and held, eye contact with each of us in turn. I watched as my mom cut her eyes away from him before he moved on to Peter and then to me.
“My family. Please do me the very great honor of coming to see me perform the role of Walter Lee Younger in the Village Troupe’s production of A Raisin in the Sun.”
Then he opened the envelope slowly, like he was at the Academy Awards announcing the Best Actor category. He took out the tickets and handed one to each of us. He looked so proud. More than that, he looked so present. For a few minutes, he wasn’t lost in his head, or a play, or some dream fantasy. He was right there with us, and he didn’t want to be somewhere else. I’d forgotten what that was like. He has this gaze that can make you feel seen.