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It’s a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers’ trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they’re thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn’t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.
A freighter bridge named for the Wampanoag chief who led a rebellion here to take back his land from Puritans, its cement abutment loops with colorful graffiti that reads SpyKids 2, Guerra a los ricos, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!!!, Laura & Jonny ’92, niños malos, and 9/11 was an inside job.
The girl back at New Hope had mentioned, without him asking, that if you dive after breaking the surface and rush to touch the river bottom, it’ll be enough, that the rapids will drag you forward and all you have to do is close your eyes until the icy water grows warm and quiet in your lungs and your pineal gland floods your brain with DMT and before you know it you’re flying in a clear, windless sky, free from the human cage of your body.
“You like my owls?” She pointed over her shoulder where an armoire loomed behind her. Behind its glass doors was a fleet of owl figurines of many shapes and sizes, some porcelain and shining, others the matte of wood or clay. “Every owl was made in a free country. None of my owls,” she leaned back, “came from Communists. Understand?” He lied by nodding.
“They’re good for you, believe me.” She cut into her latke like it was a steak and ate. “For the eyes, right?” “That’s a lie the army told in World War Two to hide the fact that they used top-notch radar. Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.”
“You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”
“When did he die, your husband?” “When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.
Her eyes lit up. “Ah, 6:43, the hour Vilnius fell to Stalin.”
“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.” She tried to laugh but started coughing. “My husband tried to be a poet, you know, and all that gave him was Alzheimer’s.”
In my country, most writers got silent pills.” “Silent pills?” “Bullets.”
“You need money to do anything, you know. My husband’s dead five years now and I still owe for his two-hour funeral. Even dying costs money. Hell, it can cost more than living.”
“Ha! The rain? Every writer who ever lived talked about rain. You know what writing really is?” She paused for effect. “Complaining. About weather. Beautiful complaining. No wonder why Stalin shipped them to Siberia.”
Sony was named after the Sony Trinitron, the first TV his father bought once he arrived in America after being released from a reeducation camp back in Vietnam.
He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the time card. He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness.
Sony requested his to be 1865, the year the Union won the war, to which Hai said, “Makes sense.” Hai’s number was 2163. He didn’t care what that meant but secretly wished it would be the year the sun finally drank up all its gas and blew up the solar system.
How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.
There are entire places in this world built just so specific phrases can be said, he realized now. Phrases like “I hereby solemnly swear,” “Do you have any last words?” “I want a divorce,” “I want an abortion,” “Congratulations, class of 2006,” or “I do, I do, I do.” In this building you can say “I need help” and they know not only exactly what you mean but also exactly who you are.
“Of course, we didn’t know what they were actually capable of. What was happening in the ghettos. If we knew, we would have left like the others, the smart ones. You see, the Germans, they saw us as just Slavs, slaves, and wanted us gone, sooner or later.”
“My mother was so scared, she became a Catholic.
“And your father, what did he believe in?” “No Catholicism, no Judaism for him. But he did convert to Alcoholism.”
“They think they’re better than us cause they have fucking salads. You kidding me? Who wants to eat leaves at a fast-food joint?”
Can you drive?” Hai shook his head. “I failed my test four times.” “Jesus Christ.”
“You kidding me? That’s amateur stuff, friend. The earth isn’t flat and it never was.” She made her hand into a sphere. “It’s hollow. And the entrance is in Antarctica. So if we keep going, we’ll hit the big ice block down south. All roads lead to Antarctica. Literally and figuratively.”
“The dinosaurs, they never died off, you get me? They evolved, just like us. Except they got a few million years’ head start on us. Now they’re intelligent lizards feeding off our negative energy,”
lots, some so flat and rusted they looked like fallen trees. She turned to him, her eyebrows arched, and it took him a moment to realize she had just asked him a question he didn’t hear. “Yeah,” he said without a clue. “You really think so?” She slit her eyes at him and bit her lip. “Most of the time. Yeah.” “Right.” She nodded. “You’re not as dull as you look, you know.”
“Oh, great, shit take mushroom salad? That’s a hard pass for me. I take plenty of shits without them, thank you.”
“That it has meaning when somebody dies. That it leads to something. But it doesn’t.” Her voice sounded buried. “The only thing that’s different is that I can’t stand flowers now. All that color just pisses me off. Sometimes flowers just make you wanna quit, you know what I mean?”
“everything in this world is Star Wars. Good versus evil. Dark and light. There’s the Jedi and then there’s the Empire. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we’re running out of time.”
“Why do I feel so terribly sad?”
“She was just a girl from long ago. No one remembers her but me.” He knew enough to nod.
Can camaraderie—the bond of working in unison—be enough to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete despite his unrecognizable beauty, the smell of his armpits seeping through his work polo, that garlicky, vinegary scent of humanness canceling the drugstore deodorant he wore to hide it? Yes, Hai realized now—it was.
Now she looked healthy, content even—her gold hoop earrings catching the candlelight as she beamed into her phone. A breeze shifted the curtain and he glimpsed her through the opening. How rare to see one’s mother lost in such unfixed and unknowable contentment, so privately realized through a scarce, snatched freedom. He felt like a voyeur and yet, like a voyeur, could not look away.
At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway?
BJ paced back and forth behind the counter as the bass raged on, the sight of their manager performing heavy metal behind the station where green beans and creamed spinach were usually served seemed conjured from a fever dream.
“We might be beautiful, but it doesn’t matter when we’re losers. We’re short losers. Beautiful, short losers. And that doesn’t do anything for anybody.”
“You’re just clinically depressed,” he heard himself say. “Means you’re sad without a reason.” Her forehead wrinkled at the idea. “No, I didn’t outlive Stalin to be depressed
“Look, I have it too. It’s just like weather. Like clouds and rain and stuff. They go away. But some of us spend more time in London, you know? Or Seattle. You’re just raining right now. Remember? What about the rabbits and the light inside the carrots and all that?” She nodded. “I guess I’m raining on Christmas Eve, then.”
“I raise my kids, I feed them, I make stuffed peppers, then one day I’m far, far away from everything and everybody. They belong to somebody else. They don’t know me. I don’t know me. I just…” She shook her head at the murky water. “I don’t know how this happened. I escaped the tyrants in Europe and I had everything I ever dreamed of. It all vanished so fast. But how?”
“I’m getting depressed.” “You and the whole world,” said BJ. “No, really. I can feel it coming. It starts in my shoulders and makes its way down.”
“I’m stupid. But at least I can say that. That I got your mom the most expensive key chain money could buy. And she loved it. The whole week she kept saying, ‘You got me real Louis Vuitton!’ Well, what can I say? I did.”
“What have I done? I’m gonna pay for being such a shitty mom. He just seems like he’s full of secrets. How did I give birth to a stranger? All these years and I still don’t know that boy.”
“You know,” said Hai, “Dostoyevsky named the protagonist, Alyosha, after his own son, who died of epilepsy when he was only three. He made him the goodest person in the book and…” Hai shook his head, not knowing where he was going with this.
“Sony.” Hai stared hard at the woods across the frost-covered road, the spaces between the birch trunks so dark they seemed filled in with Sharpie. “Look, touch me. Go ahead. Grab on.” He held out his arm and Sony squeezed it, cautious. “Harder. See? That’s the only real thing about me, that I’m sitting here next to you at this bus stop. That’s it. Everything else, what I do, what I’ve done, the goals and promises, they’re all, like, ghosts. For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.” He pointed with his chin at the scattered
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“I don’t have nothing left. Don’t you get it by now? Not even something the size of your little paper penguins. So quit going on with this stupid college shit.”
Hai accepted so much in Sony, he realized, that he wouldn’t in anyone else. The boy could say anything and he’d take it seriously. Sony could strangle somebody with his bare hands and Hai would sit down beside him at a bus stop and be convinced there was no other way, shovel in hand.
“Hey. Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?” The question sounded almost silly aloud. “I mean, like—” “Yes,” said Sony. “Why’s that?” “Because someone else will remember it.”
You know, all my life, after you were born and your father left us, I kept thinking something else would come, and it just didn’t.
“With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.”
“But am I still me if I don’t remember who I was?”
“Noah, Grandma, I’m sorry you had to die when everybody else fucking lived! But it’s not that great here, okay? It’s as shitty as it was before. Trust me.”
