She wondered if she lifted the tablecloth and crawled underneath – would Jana be waiting for her?
*
“You can call me Perla,” Rico’s mum said.
She went around the table, “. . . and that’s Tita Karen, that’s Tita Baby, that’s Weng-Weng, that’s Pinky, that’s Joseph, that’s Bongbong, that’s JJ, and this is my husband Bruce.”
Everyone waved as she said their name.
There were photos of Rico and JJ, his younger brother, in frames all over the walls, around which looped silver and gold tinsel and vines of Christmas lights. There were two stuffed Santa Clauses hanging from each corner, and a lit-up snowflake the size of a head in the window.
Perla said something to JJ in a different language and JJ picked up the cellophane-covered remote control and turned off the wide-screen TV and came back to the table.
“Your language is nice sounding,” Zorka said.
“Thank you, honey, that’s a nice thing to say,” Perla replied.
“Rico, why you never speak your language?”
“Rico doesn’t really speak Tagalog,” JJ said.
Rico pinched his lips. “Wish I did . . . I mean I understand it. I just can’t really reply in it.”
“You know when we came to America, Rico was baby,” Bruce said. “Two years old. I was veteran and Perla work nursing . . . Well, we were too busy. We didn’t take time for Rico. We try to make life here as quickly as we can. By the time JJ come, we were settled. JJ go to Sunday school, and we take time with him. That’s how it was.”
*
“Oh, honeyboy looking so handsome!” Perla said, admiring Rico from across the table.
*
Rico’s insurance wouldn’t pay for his hormones or top surgery, but his family passed around the hat, so to speak, and two Christmases ago, his present was a thin envelope wrapped in forest green paper with gold stars, and a big sparkling blue ribbon. When he opened it, it was a cheque.
*
“You still playing Pac-Man?” Rico asked.
JJ pushed Rico on the shoulder.
“That was like 1,000 years ago!”
JJ showed Rico and Zorka the new Grand Theft Auto on the widescreen.
“It’s a game where you steal cars and drive them . . .” Rico explained to Zorka.
“That legal?” Zorka asked.
“Only in video game,” Bruce interjected looking at JJ.
*
While Rico and JJ played Grand Theft Auto together, Zorka walked around the wall of photos and stopped in front of a middle-school photo, Rico had to be nine years old, he had sleek black hair in two long plaits, and a boat-neck purple shirt with a purple bow on the shoulder, and wide lip-gloss-covered smile. There was a banner on the bottom of the photo that read “Erica Joy Yee”.
“Oh, that’s a funny photo,” Perla said behind Zorka. “Rico wanted to wear his favourite blue T-shirt and big red shorts, but I kept saying wear this dress, please, you look so beautiful in it, please – so he do it for me and he let me brush his hair out and braid it nice and neat like this. I just wanted him to look so beautiful for his school photo, you know. That was, of course, when we all call Rico “she”, when we not yet understand, you know . . .
“Anyway, he did it to make mama happy, and mama was happy . . . ! But then I see Rico come home and he take off his backpack and he undo the braids and he change real quick into his blue T-shirt and his big shorts and he run around like a cloud, so free and light. I tell you, I took my two hands and I put them to my face and I say, ‘Perla Perla Perla, are you blind?’ Rico was happy in his blue T-shirt and his wild hair. Why I want him otherwise, I ask myself. I want Rico like this all time, running around so happy and comfortable and proud.”
*
“My ma is fuck-up,” Zorka said. “And my Pa is dead.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Perla patted Zorka’s back.
Zorka shrugged, then looked away as if waiting for Perla to take her hand off.
“I want for you to be like a cloud also, Zorka,” Perla continued, her hand still on Zorka, “for you to be happy and comfortable, and proud.”
*
Perla hugged Zorka and Zorka let herself be taken and held and her eyes looked around the room not knowing where to rest. As Perla held her, Zorka looked at that middle-school photo of Rico in his purple dress and long braids, then she saw Ray-Ray running in the background like the Messiah, and behind them a clearing, and in the clearing a circle of poles with carved wooden horses stuck in mid-air, then a voice so devoted and reaching that it used to scare Zorka, the voice beneath the earth, behind the door, from the sky, whispering, “Zorka . . . it’s me . . . !”
*
Before they left, Bruce said, “Hold on,” and Perla came down the stairs in a rush, holding a twenty-dollar bill.
“Honeyboy,” she handed the bill to Rico. “Treat yourself.”
Whenever Rico came home, his parents always gave him a twenty as a parting gift. Rico took the bill and kissed his mother, then his father, then gave them a hug each.
“See ya, Rico!” JJ yelled from upstairs, then ran downstairs and stood in front of Zorka.
“See ya, Zorka.”
Zorka lifted her hand to her chest and awkwardly waved to the boy. Just as she was getting ready to put her hand back in her jean pocket, Perla held out a twenty-dollar bill towards her.
“You too, honeygirl,” Perla said. “Treat yourself.”
*
Rico got accepted to Yale for a graduate programme and Paul and Ben threw the biggest party they’d ever thrown. Zorka drank too much of the grainy rum punch and kept hugging Rico saying “Don’t go!,” then running back and saying “Go, go!” She made out with the French Girl, and they fondled each other a bit on the porch until Ben snuck up on them and took a photo, then Zorka chased him around and pinned him to the ground and said, “Next time I wax your pussy, by the way, this is no joke, Bennie!” But when things calmed down, Zorka slept in Rico’s bed, pressing her forehead into his back, with her arms wrapped around his resting body.
*
The day after Rico left, Zorka went into the empty room and sat down in the middle, mindlessly tracing the wooden grading in the floorboards with the tip of the switch-blade she had stolen from Slavek’s papka back in the day, with the thin snake coiling across the metal handle.
She gave her two weeks’ notice and announced that she was taking her savings and moving to Paris with the French Girl, who said she’d get them jobs waxing somewhere and Zorka could work on her French.
*
Paul drove them to the airport and said, “You family now, so don’t do nothing stupid to each other and if you do, just say you’re sorry. Take care of each other.”
*
The Truth the Dead Know
Malá Narcis
Jana was keeping count of the days, ninety-two since Zorka had set fire to Mr Bolshakov’s boots, stolen his cash and peaced out, then snuck back and left the burning fox-fur in the hallway as her salute. The fire had left the whole floor charred and the occupants like wolves against her mamka, who discretely packed up and left in the early morning a couple of days later. Still the girl continued to be the central topic of discussion, the neighbours exchanged their opinions, inserted their expertise, summoned up examples from literature, hearsay, history, and deliberated on the appropriate form of punishment, until the topic of Zorka became the communal means of speaking about integrity in this day and age and the protection of our vulnerable youth.
*
“She should have been put in a youth detention facility long ago.”
“She belongs in jail, end of story.”
“I’d drag that girl by her hair into a cell and turn the key myself !”
“I’d lock her up by her ankle with a thick metal chain.”
“Like in a dungeon?”
“No, inside the house.”
*
“It’s a shame when girls choose to become crim
inals instead of women.”
*
. . . She’s sitting on the floor, in the corner, with the heavy chain on her ankle, in her flaming red dress, the one I gave her, and she looks absolutely beautiful . . .
*
“Well, it is not easy to give our young people democracy.”
*
“Unlock me!” she screams, her fingers scratching at the metal ankle brace.
*
“It’s true that if we don’t catch them as children, we’ll be paying the price years later . . .”
*
“I can’t unlock you, honey,” I explain to her calmly. “If I unlock you, the first thing you will do is go on the computer.”
*
“Unconventional cases call for unconventional methods.”
*
“I won’t!” she’s crying. “I promise I won’t go online!”
*
“At that age, you can already tell the type of women these girls are becoming.”
*
I kiss her on the forehead, always, before I leave for work. “I love you, my darling,” I tell her, every morning when I leave and every evening when I came back home. “However,” I must explain this to her, unfortunately, daily, “darling, despite your own efforts, you are a liar.”
One evening, my love looks a little different from usual. “What have you been up to, my one and only?” I ask her. She says, “Nothing, I have been sitting here in the corner, waiting for you to come home. I haven’t even stood up to use the basin you left me to urinate or defecate. I’ve just done both things in my underwear. Forgive me.”
I touch her cheek gently and I tell her it’s alright. “Let’s get you cleaned up, my love,” I tell her, as she is lifting up her red dress, and I get down on my knees to help take off her sullied underwear.
*
The last thing I remember is that I am crouching and reaching beneath my wife’s red dress . . .
*
When I open my eyes, I can feel right away that my trousers are down, so is my underwear. I am lying on the ground, on my back, that is certain. I try to sit up, but I can’t move my arm or my leg, even my head is pinned. I roll my eyes around and see the children, dirty-faced, holding me down and smiling. When children smile from above, it is very disconcerting. Then a voice erupts from their gaze.
“Missing something?” a girl-voice says. She’s wearing a big red bow on her dark cropped head, the hair jagged around her face, and her pupils are dense and pitch.
She’s standing above me, her eyebrows tilting like knives, and she’s holding something in her right hand. I squint and focus until I can decipher what the object is. It is, indeed, my cock.
“That’s my cock!” I shriek.
“Bingo!” the girl says. “You want it back? Or should I toss it?”
“No, no, don’t!” I plead. “I want it back!”
She wiggles the thing above me.
“Buh bye, buh bye,” she is saying in a high-pitched voice and wiggles the thing away like a fleeting bird.
“Wait! No! Wait, I said I wanted it back!”
She stops the bird’s flight and my cock quivers, then settles into stillness.
“Okay, Mister,” she says, “but you give a little, you get a little, that’s how it works. Plus, you’ve chained your wife to the house. That’s a major red flag, you know.”
All the kids begin to nod.
“But how else am I supposed to monitor her use of the worldwide-web?” I try to explain.
“We understand your concern,” the girl replies. “That’s exactly why we decided to take your dick, Mister. How else are we supposed to monitor what you do with it?”
“What do you mean? I don’t even do much with it. I urinate and I wash it when I wash myself and alright, I also touch myself from time to time, but we don’t even have sex anymore, my wife and I, when I get home and unlock her, she always says that her leg hurts and that she’s not in the mood . . . What if I give you my word, that I promise not to do anything disrespectful with my member!”
“Words are like dreams,” the kids say in unison. “Dreams are like angels. Angels know when you are lying . . . even when you don’t know yourself.”
“But I’m not lying!”
“Listen, Mr D, let’s just say I’m Snow White and I just woke up and I’m really pissed off. See what I’m getting at?”
“. . . No . . .” I’m looking around and all the kids begin to smile in succession like a circle of budding tulips.
“Hey don’t worry ’bout my friends, Mr D, it’s a whole different ballgame for them. They’re pretty homesick, you know. For me and you, well, this is just a dream. For them, it’s a diaspora. Apples and oranges.”
Then the lanky girl takes my cock and puts it in her blue hoodie pocket and takes out a shiny red apple and hands it over.
“Wanna a bite?” she asks.
“. . . No . . . thanks . . .” I’m trying to tell her, but my voice is shaky. Then the apple is pressed against my lips and her hand’s gripping my head.
“Take a bite, Mr D.”
Now I’m chewing and the kids are giggling around me.
“I have a friend in Paris . . .” the girl is explaining, “. . . all you have to say is . . . I knew your friend, the Malá Narcis . . . got it?”
I start to nod, but I can feel the apple chunks tickling my throat from the inside. I’m inhaling through my nostrils, trying to cough. The girl is reaching out her hand for me again, holding a sky-blue handkerchief, silky and limp in her fingers.
“Here you go, Mr D, mind that cough . . .”
The street named Prague
Jana lay face down, her trousers bunched right below the curve of her bare buttocks, her blouse pulled up on her back. White flesh in the darkness.
Although her body was still, her two butt-cheeks began to pull apart. From the crevice, a chatter came. The kids began crawling out, first as voices, then as bodies.
Back on the street, pigeon-toed and shy, low noses and hunched shoulders, they shuffled against each other in front of the Blue Angel bar, then began to draw up their chins, looking around.
They spotted Babička on her sewer grid, walked over to her and crouched at the blankets, rummaging inside to curl in closer.
Then the pile on the sewer grid settled and lay calm. The lump as a whole squeezed together even tighter and tighter, their bodies condensing into each other, until the limbs and blankets began to dissolve into a blue tint, thinning into the evening air.
*
Janka . . . it’s me!
PART THREE
Aimée
For the past two years, Aimée had had the sensation that she was being followed. Not by a person, but by a colour. She dropped several cobalt-rimmed dishes, then cut her index finger on the fish-scale-blue knife blade she’d got for her birthday years ago. She’d thrown away her dark blue bathrobe, painted over the brine-tinted hallway of her apartment with an objective grey, and stopped smoking Lucky Strike Blues, then Camel Blues, then Gauloises Bleues, then all cigarettes, as tobacco began to taste blue to her. She began staring at her own bruises, suspicious of their shape and movement within her skin.
But all of this, as her father suggested when she confided in him, could be explained by her own desire to draw meaning from the world around her, reveal structure and repetition to hone her sensation of chaos. She could not disagree. She wavered between apathy and panic. At its excruciating pace, time vexed even the dust. So maybe she did want the company of connotation. But it wasn’t just her eye picking up like-coloured objects, nor was her mind giving her patterns to soothe its agitation. She was definitely being followed by a bright blue cloud.
The first time she saw it was on the plane back from Portugal. Her head kept toppling over between sleep and wakefulness, then she leaned back against the seat and pulled up the window blind. There, among the white clouds was a solid blue one, thicker than the others, almost furry in its colour. She leane
d into the window, her nose against the fat glass panel. The blue cloud leaned towards her.
At home, she got in the habit of mulling around her apartment, checking the street from the living room window by the bookshelf, pacing between the couch and the TV, going to the door and squinting at the corridor through the peephole.
*
It was a couple of weeks after the plane ride. She had taken time off work. The doorbell rang. The man at the door stood with his Interflora vest, holding a bouquet in dusty lavender paper. He handed her the flowers and she said thank you and he went back down the stairs. There, among the thick wax-green leaves were four stalks of ink-blue hyacinths. Inside the bouquet, the card was a wall-white with an indigo trim, and the writing, a rehearsed cursive. Our thoughts are with you. Signed, Olivier & Angelo. Friends of Dominique’s.
She went to the window and when she looked down, there on the street, the blue cloud was hovering by the lamp post, looking up.
*
Meu Deus.
*
Time passed, and her father made frequent visits. He told her she could take a longer leave from her job, she could even move in with him if she needed to. But she went back to work, and even began looking forward to those administrative tasks that filled eight hours of her day with purpose.
The evenings and weekends remained difficult. She felt both too exhausted to take up any activities, and too anxious to have nothing to do. She kept the TV on, the volume low, crime shows and talk shows and American re-runs dubbed in French, culinary tips, politics, history revisited.
There were months when she was getting the knack of it, work-time: filing, typing, scheduling, welcoming patients during the day. Having dinner with her father twice a week. Ruminating around the rooms to the sound of her washing machine spinning, looking out the window at the lamp post, glazing over at the TV images, glimpsing at their smiles and shrieks, hugs, chases, couples having coffee face to face, old people patting each other on the knee, a silhouette walking out the door . . .
*
Virtuoso Page 13